Australian startups split almost evenly on finance timing: of 191 funded startups we tracked, 52% (100) had a finance person before their first announced round and 48% (91) hired after it.
What are you trying to decide?
Should we hire finance before the raise or after it?
52%(100 of 191) had a finance person before their first announced round, a median 17 months ahead of it. The other 48% (91) hired after it.2
What brings it forward is the work. When someone properly owns finance, forecasts become believable and board prep stops being a scramble, and a raise needs both.
We have just raised and nobody owns finance. How long is normal?
14 monthswas the median wait for a first finance hire after a Series A (n=48), among companies with no internal finance hire.4 46% (21 of 46) hired within 12.
Count the ramp too: the first weeks go on finding where the mess is, and founders usually start to feel the hire around day 60.
Should our first finance hire be a CFO?
71%(135 of 191) started below CFO, most often with a head of finance or a financial controller. No single seat took more than 29%.
Brief the seat for where the business is going. As I said on Celia’s Corner, “the now is a very short period of time and it’s very different to six months from now.”
We have one finance person. What should the second hire be?
49%(77 of 156) of second hires were more junior than the first. 30% (47) were more senior, 30 of them a CFO.
Either way, the hire should give someone capacity back. If it only adds admin and another reporting line, something has gone wrong.
Two of these fit, or none? Send me your stage, when the next round lands and who does finance today. Even if it is early days, you get a straight answer on where you sit.
Get a read on my finance hireBy industry
The same four benchmarks, rebuilt for one sector at a time with that sector’s own figures and case companies.
Tech
Software and internet, with software-only figures and case companies.
Fintech
For businesses whose product moves, lends or manages money.
Deep tech
Hardware, materials, biotech, space and energy technology.
Common questions
What are the finance hiring benchmarks based on?
Story Recruitment's study of 194 venture-funded Australian startups, each with a funding round confirmed by two independent searches of public announcements. 966 finance hires at those companies were dated from public professional profiles, 907 of them to the month, and matched against each company's announced rounds.
Do most Australian startups hire finance before or after they raise?
Roughly half and half. Of the 191 companies we tracked with a dated finance hire, 52% (100) had a finance person before their first announced round, a median 17 months ahead of it, and 48% (91) hired after it, a median 18 months later. Only 39% (74) hired within a year of the round either way.
Do these benchmarks show that hiring finance early helps a startup?
No. They record the order in which things happened. An earlier test on the first 102 companies in the study found no link between the timing of the first finance hire and raising again that could be told apart from chance. Use them to see what companies at your point did, then decide for your own business.
Notes
- The benchmarks come from 194 venture-funded Australian startups of roughly 2 to 500 staff, each with a round confirmed by two independent searches of public announcements. 966 finance hires were dated from public professional profiles, 907 of them to the month.
- They show order, not cause. Nothing here says hiring earlier or later leads to a better outcome.
- They describe survivors. Every company announced a round and built an internal finance function we could find.
- Outsourced finance does not show. A fractional or virtual CFO supplied by a firm never lists the startup as an employer, so “nobody in finance” means no internal hire we could find. 16 of the 191 first hires (8%) were visibly fractional, part-time or interim, and that is a floor. As I said on The CFO Track, “the fractional CFO or virtual CFO space is very popular.”
The full method and the rest of the caveats are in the study’s methodology section, and the company-level data is free to download from the open dataset page.
These guides set out how we see it, drawn from the searches we run and the finance leaders we work with. They are general information about the market, not financial, accounting or legal advice, and they are no substitute for advice on your own circumstances.