19 of 52 Australian deep tech companies we tracked had no finance person when their first round was announced. They took a median 21 months to make the first finance hire, but 7 hired within 6 months and 12 took more than a year.
First, check that this question applies to you
In Australian deep tech, most companies never face it. 33 of the 52 deep tech companies we tracked (63%) already had a finance person when their first round was announced, which is covered on whether deep tech hires finance before or after the first raise. This page is about the other 19: companies that announced a round with nobody internal in finance, and then had to decide when to hire. 19 companies is a small base, so the figures below are printed as counts wherever a group falls under 10, and the shape matters more than any single number.
The benchmark: two clocks, not one
The median wait was 21 months from the first announced round to the first finance hire, with the middle half between 5 and 38 months. That median sits in a gap. The companies bunch at the two ends.
| Months after the first round | Companies | First hire in that band |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 3 | 3 | CFO in all 3 |
| 4 to 6 | 4 | Financial controller 3, finance manager 1 |
| 7 to 12 | 0 | None |
| 13 to 24 | 5 | Head of finance 2, CFO 1, controller 1, manager 1 |
| 25 to 48 | 4 | Head of finance 2, controller 1, manager 1 |
| More than 48 | 3 | CFO 2, finance manager 1 |
| All 19 | Median 21 | Middle half 5 to 38 months |
Seven companies moved fast. Six of the seven hired at controller level or above within six months, and the three that hired inside a quarter all hired a CFO. Then nothing for six months, and the remaining twelve hired a year or more after the round, three of them more than four years after it.
The obvious guess, that the fast group raised bigger or later rounds, does not hold up in the round labels. The fast seven and the slow twelve are both a mix of seed and Series A first rounds (3 seed, 3 Series A and 1 Series B among the fast group; 5 seed, 6 Series A and 1 other round among the slow one). Round amounts are too unreliable in public announcements to test the size question properly, so we have not. What the data does say is that a deep tech company that has not hired within six months of its round is, on this evidence, unlikely to hire in the next six either.
After a seed, and after a Series A
The same question can be asked of any round, not just the first. The table below takes every deep tech company that had nobody in finance when a seed or Series A was announced, whether or not it was the company’s first round, and measures the months to the first finance hire.
| Round | Median months to first finance hire | Hired within 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| Seed (n=8) | 20 | 3 of 8 |
| Series A (n=13) | 15 | 5 of 12 |
Both clocks are close to the all-startup figures: 21 months after a seed (n=42) and 14 after a Series A (n=48) across every sector. So once a deep tech company has raised without a finance hire, it waits about as long as anyone else. The difference in deep tech is not the wait. It is that far fewer companies are waiting in the first place. The “hired within 12 months” column only counts companies whose round is at least a year old, so recent raisers do not drag it down.
Three deep tech companies that raised first and hired after
Each case is built from public profile titles and publicly announced rounds, in order, with the round announcements linked. They show what the post-raise hire looked like in practice, not what it should be.
Morse Micro
Deep tech: fabless semiconductors, Wi-Fi HaLow chips
- Founded
- 2016
- Confirmed rounds
- Seed Oct 2017; Series A May 2019; Series B Jun and Nov 2022; Series C Sep 2025
- First finance hire
- VP finance and operations, Jul 2019
- Against the first round
- 21 months after the seed; 2 months after the Series A
- Next finance hires
- Assistant accountants from Jan 2023; CFO Mar 2026
- Now
- The first hire still in role after seven years, with a CFO above
Morse Micro ran through its seed and into a Series A in May 2019 with nobody internal in finance. Two months after the Series A it hired a VP of finance and operations, a combined seat for a chip company moving from design towards production.
What stands out is how long that one seat carried the business. Through a A$140 million Series B in 2022, the visible finance team grew only by assistant accountants. A CFO arrived in March 2026, six months after an A$88 million Series C, and the original VP is still in role. Nearly seven years from the first finance hire to the first CFO, with nobody pushed out along the way.
A combined finance and operations seat straight after the Series A can carry a hardware company a long way. The question is not whether a CFO arrives above it, but when, and how the first hire is told.
Q-CTRL
Deep tech: quantum control software and quantum sensing
- Founded
- 2017
- Confirmed rounds
- Series A Sep 2019; Series B Nov 2021, extended Jan 2023 and Oct 2024
- First finance hire
- Head of finance, Oct 2021
- Against the first round
- 25 months after the Series A; 1 month before the Series B
- Next finance hires
- VP or head of finance Aug 2022; financial controllers Apr 2023 and Apr 2024; accountants 2023 and 2025
- Now
- Led by a VP or head of finance; no CFO title on record
Q-CTRL raised a US$15 million Series A in September 2019 and then ran for two years with no internal finance hire visible in public profiles. A gap like that is usually covered by an outside provider, which this data cannot see. The first head of finance started in October 2021, one month before a US$25 million Series B.
The more interesting part is what did not happen next. The Series B was extended twice, to US$113 million by October 2024, and the top finance title stayed at head or VP of finance. The team was built underneath instead: two financial controllers, a general accountant and, in 2025, a senior revenue accountant, a hire that says revenue has become complex enough to need its own owner. Q-CTRL sells software, and it has run its finance like a software company.
A two-year gap after a Series A is normal for a software-heavy deep tech company. The internal hire tends to land when the next raise comes into view.
Loam Bio
Deep tech: microbial seed coatings that store carbon in soil
- Founded
- 2019
- Confirmed rounds
- Seed Jun 2020; Series A Oct 2021; Series B Feb 2023
- First finance hire
- VP finance, Jan 2022
- Against the first round
- 19 months after the seed; 3 months after the Series A
- Next finance hires
- Financial accountant Dec 2022; acting CFO Nov 2024; finance manager Apr 2025
- Now
- Finance manager in role; the acting CFO role ended Nov 2025
Loam Bio raised a seed in 2020 and a A$40 million Series A in October 2021 before hiring anyone internal in finance. A VP of finance started three months after the Series A and a financial accountant followed in December 2022, just ahead of a A$105 million Series B.
When the VP of finance left in May 2024, the top seat was covered by an acting CFO from November 2024 for a year, with a finance manager joining underneath in April 2025. The sequence shows the post-raise hire lasting one full funding cycle, and the company bridging the gap rather than rushing a permanent replacement.
A senior hire soon after the Series A can see a company through its next raise. Plan how the top seat is covered if that person leaves between rounds; an acting CFO is a legitimate bridge.
Hysata, which hired a CFO two months after its Series A, is on whether deep tech hires finance before or after the first raise.
What I tell deep tech founders who have just closed
The 19 companies in this page had nobody on the payroll doing finance. That does not mean nobody was doing it. A lot of what looks like a gap in public records is a provider. As I said on Celia’s Corner:
“What will often happen before someone hires in finance, they might have an external party that they hire as like an outsourced fractional CFO or a virtual CFO.”
A pre-revenue founder came to me recently for exactly that kind of cover: a fractional CFO to get visibility over the numbers and make the model match the plan.[1] If that is you, the round closing is the start of a clock you set, not a reason to rush. Before approving the internal hire, I would ask the questions most startups skip: what problem is this person actually solving, what does it do to runway, and what happens if revenue comes in late?[2] For a pre-revenue deep tech company the last two are not hypothetical.
The months after a raise are where a finance hire earns the most, in my view, because that is when the money has to turn into the milestones it was raised to deliver.[3] In deep tech those milestones are technical and expensive, and often contractual. As I put it on the Behind The Story podcast, the finance person’s job is getting a good financial model in place because:
“Their funding might be tied to certain checkpoints in the company, and making sure that they’re tracking on those.”
When that ownership is in place, founders notice it quickly: reporting gets clearer, forecasts become more believable and hiring plans get tested before they become commitments.[4]
The data gives a checkpoint rather than a rule: the deep tech companies in this study that moved quickly had made the hire within six months of the round, and none hired in months 7 to 12. If the seat is not decided by then, the pattern here says it tends to drift past a year.
If part-time cover is carrying you now, the signs you have outgrown it are in fractional CFO in Australia.
Compare: deep tech against fintech, software and all startups
| Figure | Deep tech | Fintech | Software | All startups |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hired after the first round | 19 of 52 | 18 of 40 | 45 of 82 | 91 of 191 |
| Median months after | 21 | 21 | 18 | 18 |
| Middle half, months | 5 to 38 | 12 to 28 | 7 to 42 | 6 to 36 |
| After a seed: median months (n) | 20 (8) | 31 (8) | 21 (24) | 21 (42) |
| After a Series A: median months (n) | 15 (13) | 15 (12) | 12 (20) | 14 (48) |
| Hired within 12 months of a Series A | 5 of 12 | 4 of 12 | 11 of 20 (55%) | 21 of 46 (46%) |
The same question for the other sectors: how long after a raise Australian fintechs hire finance, how long after a raise Australian software startups hire finance and how long after a raise Australian startups hire finance across every sector. The rest of the deep tech series:
- Before or after the first raise: deep tech
- What deep tech hires first in finance
- The second finance hire in deep tech
- Every finance hiring benchmark, by subject and sector
Once you know the timing, the next questions are the seat and the search: when to hire a CFO and how to hire a CFO in Australia.
How these figures were built
All figures come from Story Recruitment’s study of 194 funded Australian startups, 53 of them deep tech. A company qualified when two independent searches of public funding announcements found the same round. Every finance role at each company was dated from public professional profiles, using the earliest finance role each person held there. “Hired after” means the first finance hire started in or after the month the first round was announced. The seed and Series A clocks only include companies that had no finance hire when that round was announced, so they measure the first-hire decision and not a later backfill.
What this data cannot tell you
- It does not show that hiring finance earlier or later causes a better outcome. It records the order things happened in. The only outcome test so far was run on the first 102 companies in the study, before it grew to 194. There, the share that raised again within 24 months of the first finance hire ran 55% when the hire came before any round (27 of 49), 47% at Series A (7 of 15) and 33% at Series B or later (2 of 6), and none of those differences could be told apart from chance (Fisher exact test, p=0.77 and p=0.41). Outcomes have not been collected for the full 194, and companies that hire early and companies that raise again are often the same well-organised companies, so no timing figure in this series is an argument for a timing.
- It is a survivor set. Every company announced a round and has at least one finance employee we could find, so the study describes companies that did build an internal finance function. In the 93 of the first 102 companies with a usable status there was not one insolvency, administration or wind-up. It cannot say what share of Australian startups have no finance lead at all.
- Outsourced and fractional finance is invisible. A virtual or fractional CFO supplied by a firm does not list the startup as an employer, so it never appears in public employment records. 16 of the 191 first hires we tracked (8%) were visibly fractional, part-time or interim, and that is a floor. Every “had no finance hire” figure means no internal hire we could find, among the companies we tracked.
- There is no headcount at the time of the hire. Only today’s headcount is public, so nothing here says “they hired a CFO at 40 staff”. The companies run from roughly 2 to 500 staff today.
- Titles are counted once. Each person is recorded at the earliest finance title they held at the company, so a controller promoted to CFO in the same business reads as a controller. Every “later added a CFO” figure is a floor.
- Rounds are dated by announcement. An announcement usually trails the close by weeks, rounds that were never announced are invisible, and grants and research funding are not in the round series. Round amounts are the least reliable field and no figure in this series rests on one. For 12 companies with names too common to search cleanly, past-staff coverage is a floor.
- It is not the market report. Story’s earlier market report on the first finance hire measured something different, the share of recently funded companies with a finance leader at each stage, so its figures and these do not compare directly.
- This page rests on 19 companies. That is enough to describe a shape and not enough to set a rule. Every group under 10 companies is printed as a count. One of the 19 waited more than ten years from its first announced round, which stretches the top band but barely moves the median and middle half.
The full method, including how rounds were double-checked and how same-named companies overseas were excluded, is in the study’s methodology section.
Common questions
How long after the first round do deep tech startups make their first finance hire?
Among the Australian deep tech companies we tracked that had nobody in finance when their first round was announced, the median was 21 months (n=19), with the middle half between 5 and 38 months. The distribution splits in two: 7 of the 19 hired within 6 months, 12 took more than a year, and none hired between 7 and 12 months.
How long after a Series A does a deep tech company hire finance?
Of the 13 Australian deep tech companies we tracked that had no finance hire when their Series A was announced, the median time to the first finance hire was 15 months. 5 of the 12 that have had a full year since the round hired within 12 months. Across all sectors the Series A median was 14 months (n=48).
Is 21 months a normal wait for a deep tech startup?
It is the median, but very few companies actually sit near it. In the 19 deep tech companies that hired after their first round, the waits bunch at the two ends: 7 within six months and 12 after more than a year. The more useful question is which of those two groups your company is in, and whether someone outside the payroll, such as a fractional CFO, is covering finance in the meantime.
Does hiring finance soon after a raise help a deep tech company raise again?
This data does not show that, and we do not claim it. It records when the hire happened relative to the round, not whether the timing changed anything that followed.
References
- From a LinkedIn post in June 2026: a founder of a pre-revenue startup came to me looking for a fractional CFO to get financial visibility and bring the model into line with the direction of the business.
- From a LinkedIn post on the questions startups miss before hiring: what problem is this person actually solving, what does this do to runway, what happens if revenue comes in late, and are we hiring for today’s bottleneck or the structure we want in 18 months?
- From a LinkedIn post written for founders who have just closed a round: the best finance people are most valuable in the six months after the raise, not the six months before it, making sure the capital creates the outcome it was raised to deliver.
- From a LinkedIn post on what changes when someone owns finance: reporting gets clearer, forecasts become more believable, board prep gets less chaotic, cash conversations get more accurate, and hiring plans get tested before they become commitments.
These guides set out how we see it, drawn from the searches we run and the finance leaders we place. They are general information about the market, not financial, accounting or legal advice, and they are no substitute for advice on your own circumstances.