Story Recruitment finance hire study, 2026: public dataset ========================================================== Published by Story Recruitment (storyrecruitment.com.au). Data read 23 to 24 September 2026. Licence: CC BY 4.0. Cite as: Story Recruitment (2026). When Australian startups make their finance hires: 194 venture-funded companies. https://www.storyrecruitment.com.au/insights/finance-hiring-data What it is ---------- 194 Australian companies with at least one venture round that two independent searches of public funding announcements both found. For each company we dated every finance hire we could find on public professional profiles (966 hires, 907 to the month) and set the first one against the company's announced rounds. Files ----- story-finance-hire-study-2026-companies.csv one row per company (194 rows) story-finance-hire-study-2026-rounds.csv one row per confirmed round (430 rows), with the source we cited Columns, companies file ----------------------- company company name website company domain sector tech, fintech, deeptech or other, tagged from what the product does founded founding year from the company's public profile linkedin_headcount_band_floor lower bound of the public headcount band (2, 11, 51 or 201) first_announced_round_stage stage of the earliest confirmed round first_announced_round year-month of that round's announcement confirmed_rounds number of rounds both searches found first_finance_hire_seat seat of the earliest finance hire we could identify first_finance_hire_start year-month it started (year only where the profile gives only a year) first_finance_hire_date_precision month or year months_first_round_to_first_finance_hire negative means the hire came before the first round first_finance_hire_before_first_round yes or no; a hire in the month of the round counts as after it finance_hires_found finance hires dated at the company soft_row yes for the 6 companies whose qualifying raise was a placement, a corporate investment or a grant rather than a clear venture round common_name_floor yes for the 12 companies whose names are too common to search past staff in full; their counts are a floor What it cannot tell you ----------------------- - It records order, not cause. Nothing in it shows that hiring finance earlier or later leads to a better outcome. An outcome test on the first 102 companies found no difference that could be told apart from chance (Fisher exact test, p=0.77 and p=0.41). - The companies were found through their finance people, so the data describes companies that did build an internal finance function. It cannot say what share of all Australian startups have no finance lead. - An outsourced or fractional CFO supplied by a firm does not list the startup as an employer and does not appear. "No finance hire" means no internal hire we could find. - Rounds are dated by announcement, which trails the close by weeks. Unannounced rounds are invisible. Round amounts are left out because they were the least reliable field. - Start dates are self-reported on public profiles. "First finance hire" is the earliest one we could identify. - The files hold no names, profile links, individual job titles or round amounts. Full method: https://www.storyrecruitment.com.au/insights/when-australian-startups-hire-finance#methodology Questions or corrections: info@storyrecruitment.com.au