Of 40 funded Australian fintechs we tracked, 18 hired finance only after their first announced round. Their median wait was 21 months, the middle half took 12 to 28 months, and only 5 of the 18 hired within a year.
First, which group are you in?
This question only applies to some fintechs. Of the 40 in the study, 22 already had a finance person in place before their first round was announced, so for them the post-raise clock never started. The before-or-after benchmark for fintech covers that group. This page is about the other 18: fintechs that raised first and hired finance afterwards.
It also only sees internal hires. A fintech that ran its first two years after the raise on a fractional CFO counts here as waiting two years, because a provider supplied by a firm never lists the startup as its employer. Only 1 of the 40 fintech first hires was visibly part-time in public records, against 7 of 82 in tech and 8 of 52 in deep tech, and every one of those counts is a floor. So read every duration below as the time to the first internal finance hire.
The spread after the first round
| Months after the first round | Fintech (n=18) | All startups (n=91) |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 3 | 2 | 16 |
| 4 to 6 | 1 | 8 |
| 7 to 12 | 2 | 10 |
| 13 to 24 | 5 | 25 |
| 25 to 36 | 5 | 9 |
| More than 36 | 3 | 23 |
| Median (middle half) | 21 (12 to 28) | 18 (6 to 36) |
Two things stand out. First, fintechs that raise before they hire are not quick about it: 5 of the 18 hired within a year of the first round, against 34 of 91 across all startups. Second, fintech is tighter at the long end. Only 3 of the 18 waited more than three years, where across all startups a quarter of the post-round group did. The fintech pattern is a year to two and a half years of waiting, then the hire.
I would not build a plan around the exact shape. Eighteen companies is enough to say where most of them landed and not enough to say there is a gap in any particular band. What it does tell a fintech founder who has just raised is that having nobody in finance six months later puts you with most of your peers, not behind them.
The clock by round: seed is slow, Series A is the decision point
The first-round view mixes companies whose first round was a seed with companies whose first round was a Series A. This table separates them. It takes every fintech that had no internal finance hire when a seed, Series A or Series B was announced, and measures the months to the first finance hire from that round. A company only counts in a within-12 or within-24 column once that much time has passed since its round.
| Round | Fintechs with no internal finance hire | Median months to first hire | Hired within 12 months | Hired within 24 months |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 8 | 31 | 1 of 8 | 3 of 8 |
| Series A | 12 | 15 | 4 of 12 (33%) | 8 of 12 (67%) |
| Series B | 4 | 5 | 4 of 4 | 4 of 4 |
Seed-funded fintechs with no internal finance hire take their time: a median 31 months, the longest of any sector we tracked after a seed. That is not negligence. At seed a good external accountant and a part-time adviser usually carry the load, and I would rather a founder did that than hired the wrong person on seed money.
The Series A is where the decision gets made. Two in three of the fintechs that reached a Series A with no internal finance hire had hired within two years of it. The pattern I see is fractional help bridging the gap first: when I introduced one early-stage founder to a fractional CFO, the point I made was that a company needing fractional cover today may be building something that needs a full-time hire in 18 months. By Series B the question is closed. Every one of the four fintechs we tracked that got there with no internal finance hire made one within a year.
If the Series A is closed and you are deciding the level, I set out when a fintech needs a CFO rather than a head of finance.
Three fintechs that raised first: how long they waited
Three recent Australian fintechs from the study that had no internal finance hire when a round was announced, and what they did next. Titles and months from public profiles and announced rounds; people are not named. Outsourced help before the first internal hire would not show up here.
Honey Insurance
Home and contents insurance, underwriting and distribution, founded 2020
- Rounds
- Seed Jun 2021; Series A Apr 2024
- First finance hire
- CFO, May 2024
- After the round
- 35 months after the seed; 1 month after the Series A
- Next finance hires
- A further CFO 2024 (year only); head of finance Aug 2024; head of commercial finance Jul 2025; VP finance Sep 2025; CFO May 2026
- Status now
- Operating; head of finance and CFO in role
Honey announced what it called the largest seed round in Australian history for a tech company in June 2021, and then went almost three years without an internal finance hire we could find. A Series A followed in April 2024, and a CFO started the next month.
That is the Series A decision point in its sharpest form: 35 months of waiting after the seed, then one month after the A. What came next is the part to learn from. The first CFO left after six months; a head of finance joined in August 2024 and is still there; several senior finance titles followed, and a further CFO started in May 2026. The hire was fast; the seat took longer to settle.
What usually breaks in the month after the money lands: the forecast is not detailed enough for the board you now report to, the reporting rhythm is calibrated to a business half the size, and the hiring plan is ambitious without being properly costed. I wrote about that month on LinkedIn.
The takeaway for a founderIf the round comes with an expectation of a finance hire, the level matters more than the speed. Hiring within a month is fast; make sure the brief is for the business after the round.
Driva
Car loan marketplace that prices and originates credit, founded 2019
- Rounds
- Seed May 2021; growth raise Mar 2022
- First finance hire
- Head of finance, November 2024
- After the round
- 42 months after the seed
- Next finance hire
- None found yet
- Status now
- Head of finance still in role
Driva is a car finance marketplace: it prices loans and originates credit, which puts it in the lending half of fintech, the half that usually hires early. It announced its seed round in May 2021 and growth funding in March 2022.
The first internal finance hire we could find is a head of finance in November 2024, 42 months after the seed, and it is still the only one. It is the longest wait of the three here and a useful counterexample: a lending product does not guarantee an early hire. Public records cannot show what covered finance in those three and a half years; most companies at that stage lean on outside accounting help, which would not show up here.
The cost of moving on from founder-led finance later than you should is slower decisions, a founder spending bandwidth on work they should not own, and messier reporting, and the reporting is only the visible part. I set out those costs on LinkedIn.
The takeaway for a founderA long wait is not unusual, even in lending. If you are running on outside help, the trigger for an internal hire is finance becoming the bottleneck, not the calendar.
Bridgit
Bridging-loan lender, founded 2021
- Rounds
- Series A Mar 2022; second Series A Jun 2024
- First finance hire
- Head of finance, March 2022
- After the round
- The same month as the Series A
- Next finance hires
- Finance manager May 2022; financial accountant Feb 2023; CFO May 2024
- Status now
- CFO in role since May 2024
Bridgit lends to homeowners who are buying before they sell. It announced its first Series A in March 2022, and its head of finance started the same month, the fastest post-round hire in this set. A finance manager followed two months later.
The next step came with the funding line. A CFO started in May 2024, the month the head of finance left, and in June the company announced a debt facility alongside a further Series A raise. For a lender, the balance sheet is the product, and the finance seat grows with it.
For a lender, the first round and the first finance hire can be the same event. The CFO seat followed the funding line, not the calendar.
What I see after a fintech raises
The six months after the raise matter more than the six before. Founders tend to think of finance as the thing that gets them through diligence. I think the best finance people earn their keep after the money lands, turning the plan the round was raised on into a forecast a new board can hold you to. As I put it after one founder closed a round, they 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. If you have just closed a round with nobody in the seat, that is the gap to worry about, not the date on the calendar.
Fractional cover has a shelf life. Plenty of fintechs bridge the post-raise period with a fractional CFO, and that can be the right call. But as I said on a podcast:
“The fractional relationship with a provider might only be 18 to 24 months. And then at the back end of it, when a business outgrows them, then they refer to me.”
Put that next to the fintech median of 21 months after a first round and it lines up closely. It may be why so many of these companies hire when they do, though public records cannot show who had a fractional provider first.
Do not let the round pick the title. The other mistake runs the opposite way: a bigger round does not by itself create a CFO job, and in this study 9 of the 10 fintechs that started with a CFO have since seen that CFO leave. What fintechs actually hired, and how long each kind of hire stayed, is in the fintech what-to-hire-first benchmark.
Compare: months to the first finance hire after a round
| Cut | After first round | After seed | After Series A | After Series B |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fintech (this page) | 21 (18) | 31 (8) | 15 (12) | 5 (4) |
| All startups | 18 (91) | 21 (42) | 14 (48) | 5 (13) |
| Tech | 18 (45) | 21 (24) | 12 (20) | 2 (5) |
| Deep tech | 21 (19) | 20 (8) | 15 (13) | 49 (2) |
Fintech and deep tech both run a median 21 months after a first round, a little slower than software. The difference sits at seed, where the few fintechs that raised a seed with no internal finance hire waited longest. Groups under 10 are shown so the comparison is complete, not because they carry a benchmark on their own.
How long after a raise, in the other cuts: All startups, Tech, Deep tech.
Fintech, the other three questions: Before or after the first raise, What to hire first, The second finance hire. All of them sit in the finance hiring benchmarks series.
Common questions
How long after raising do Australian fintechs hire their first finance person?
Of the 40 funded Australian fintechs in Story Recruitment's study, 18 had no internal finance hire when their first round was announced. For those 18, the median gap to the first internal finance hire was 21 months, and the middle half took between 12 and 28 months. Only 5 of the 18 hired within 12 months. Some will have had an outsourced or fractional CFO in the meantime, which public employment records do not show.
How soon after a Series A does a fintech hire finance?
Among the 12 fintechs we tracked that had no internal finance hire when their Series A was announced, the median was 15 months to the first finance hire. 4 of the 12 hired within 12 months and 8 of the 12 within 24 months.
Is it normal for a seed-stage fintech to wait years before hiring finance?
In our data, yes. The 8 fintechs we tracked that had no internal finance hire when their seed round was announced took a median 31 months to make one, and only 1 of the 8 hired within a year. Many will have used an outsourced accountant or a fractional CFO in the meantime, which public records do not show.
What happens after a Series B if a fintech still has no finance hire?
It hires quickly. Only 4 of the fintechs we tracked had no internal finance hire when their Series B was announced, and all 4 hired within 12 months, a median 5 months after the round. Across all startups the median was also 5 months (n=13).
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.
The full method, including how rounds were double-checked and how same-named companies overseas were excluded, is in the study’s methodology section.
How these figures were built
The companies. 194 Australian venture-backed companies whose funding round was found independently by two searches of public funding announcements. 191 have at least one dated finance hire. By sector: 83 tech, 53 deep tech, 40 fintech and 18 other. Sector is tagged from what each company sells, not its industry label: fintech means the product is financial (payments, lending, banking, insurance, wealth, trading or crypto infrastructure).
The hires. Every finance role at each company, current and past, from public professional profiles, dated from the earliest finance role each person held there. 966 finance hires, 907 dated to the month. Titles are grouped into five seats: CFO; head of finance or finance director; financial controller; finance manager; accountant or FP&A analyst. People are not named on any page in this series; case companies are described by title and month only.
Fintech on this page. The first table covers the 18 of 40 fintechs whose earliest finance hire started after their earliest announced round. The round table takes, for each stage, fintechs with no internal finance hire when their first round of that stage was announced, and counts a company in the 12 or 24 month column only once that much time has passed since the round. Every company here did eventually hire, so these are completed waits, and the company that raised and still has nobody is invisible.
The full method, sources and dating rules are set out in the study methodology. Data read 24 September 2026.
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.