A biotech startup’s value isn’t built on science alone. 

Investors know it. Founders feel it. And the ones who scale successfully build teams that reflect it early.

From seed to Series B, your hiring strategy isn’t just about simply plugging gaps. It’s about creating infrastructure that can carry the business through high-growth inflection points, without breaking.

That’s what we mean by a scalable team. And here’s what it looks like at every stage.

Seed: Build lean. Hire deliberately.

At this stage, every hire counts (and every mistake costs.) You’re balancing deep scientific expertise with the ability to translate it into an industry-ready setting: advancing your science at pace despite a small headcount.

It’s not about throwing bodies at the problem. It’s about finding people who can work across disciplines, thrive in ambiguity, and take ownership beyond their job title. You need those senior enough to lead, hands-on enough to execute, and committed enough to ride out the volatility.

We help founders make these early hires with intent – bringing in individuals who can build, adapt, and set the tone for the culture that follows.

Series A: Formalise the core. Plug the gaps.

Once funding lands, the pressure ramps up. Scientific milestones, clinical plans, go-to-clinic roadmaps. All moving at once.

At this point, your hiring strategy needs to mature. You’re no longer building just for now, you’re building what the business will need 6, 12, 18 months out. That means identifying capability gaps early, creating scalable team structures, and avoiding over-indexing on technical hires at the expense of operations, product, or platform.

This is where we see the most friction: teams trying to scale without the foundations to support growth. Our job is to help you avoid that: bringing in the right clinical operations, regulatory, and data science hires that can take the business from function to flow.

Series B: Specialist talent meets delivery pressure

Now you’re hiring for scale, and everyone’s watching.

Investors want delivery. Teams want clarity. And the business needs to shift from reactive hiring to proactive workforce planning.

At this stage, hiring becomes less about potential and more about proof. You need people who’ve seen scale before, who know what good looks like, and who can take your science from a promising prototype through the clinic – positioning the asset for potential out-licensing or market entry.

We partner with biotech scale-ups to make these hires globally, connecting them with proven talent across R&D leadership, clinical development, regulatory affairs, and specialised technical functions – often in hard-to-hire markets like the US, UK, and DACH.

Because when you’re hiring for exit, it’s not just about who you hire. It’s when, why, and how.

 

Investors back teams they believe can execute. Founders need to build teams that can grow without constant intervention. And the fastest-growing life sciences companies see hiring not as a side task, but as core to their strategy.