Australian tech startups made their second finance hire a median 15 months after the first (n=64). The second hire was more often junior than senior: 34 of 64 came in below the first hire’s level.
15 months, then 11, then 7
| Step | Tech | All startups |
|---|---|---|
| First to second hire | 15 (n=64) | 16 (n=156) |
| Second to third | 11 (n=46) | 11 (n=120) |
| Third to fourth | 7 (n=39) | 8 (n=107) |
| Fourth to fifth | 7 (n=29) | 7 (n=83) |
The gap from the first finance hire to the second is the long one: a median 15 months in tech, almost exactly the market’s 16. After that the function fills in faster. The third hire followed the second by a median 11 months and the fourth by 7. Allowing for time, 41 of the 70 tech companies whose first hire was at least two years ago (59%) had made a second within 24 months.
So the planning number for a software founder is roughly this: expect the first finance person to run alone for a bit over a year, and expect the next few hires to arrive in quicker succession once the second is in. The quickening is a pattern in the order hires happen, not a rule, and I would not budget a team off it without looking at the plan behind it.
Who the second hire is
The second finance hire in tech usually goes down the ladder, not up. Ranking the titles as accountant or analyst, then finance manager, then financial controller, then head of finance, then CFO:
| Second hire | Tech companies |
|---|---|
| Below the first hire’s level | 34 of 64 |
| At the same level | 10 of 64 |
| Above the first hire’s level | 20 of 64 |
By title, the most common tech second hire was an accountant or FP&A analyst (17 of 64), then a CFO (15), a finance manager (13), a financial controller (11) and a head of finance (8). No single pairing of first and second title reaches more than 5 companies, so there is no standard two-step in tech either. What the level split does say is that most second hires build underneath the first person, and roughly one in three go over the top.
How that second hire is sourced is often the first hire’s call.[1] And what the junior seat is for is changing: the ledger, payables and reconciliation work that used to justify a second hire is increasingly automated or offshored in the tech companies I work with.[2] In practice that means the second hire in a software company is more often an analyst who can own the model and the board pack than a pure transactional accountant.
Stopping at one
18 of 82 tech companies (22%) have made exactly one finance hire, against 35 of 191 (18%) across the study. Some of that is simply recent hiring; allowing for time, 6 of the 64 tech companies whose first hire was at least three years ago still have only one. The one-person functions are telling in what they hired: 8 of the 18 are a financial controller and 7 a head of finance, and 11 of the 18 are still in the seat. A controller or head of finance running a software company’s finance alone, with outside help above and below, is a model that lasts in tech.
It is not a model that suits every business, though. When one of my guests on The CFO Track kept coming back to lean teams, I pushed back on it in Episode 12: lean is “very much a flavor of the startup life”, but “lean teams don’t always work either.” A one-person function works when the person is strong enough to build systems instead of absorbing work, and when outside help covers the gaps.
How deep the function is by stage
| Latest stage reached | Companies | Median finance hires | Five or more hires |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed or earlier (or unlabelled) | 21 | 2 | 5 of 21 |
| Series A | 37 | 3 | 9 of 37 |
| Series B or later | 24 | 6 | 15 of 24 |
Series B is the step change. A tech company that has reached Series B or later has typically made twice as many finance hires as one still at Series A. Stage reached is tangled up with company age, so this is partly just time, but it matches what I see in the briefs. Before Series B, finance is lean.
When the second step is a CFO
This is where the second finance hire becomes my conversation. Of the 62 tech companies whose first finance hire was below CFO, 24 later hired a CFO. In 11 of those 24, the CFO started while the first hire was still in the seat; in 11, the first hire had already gone; the other 2 cannot be placed because the first hire is dated to the year only. The CFO who lands over the top of a founder’s first finance hire is the hardest brief in this whole sequence. The incumbent often built the function, knows the business better than anyone, and was not told at offer stage that a CFO would one day sit above them.
The reason it happens is not that the first hire failed. It is that the job changed. As I wrote in a post on why the most expensive finance hire a startup makes is usually the one that follows the first, the person who is perfect at pre-revenue, building the foundations, will likely lead the function through Series A, but a Series B with institutional investors has very different requirements.
My advice for a tech founder hiring the first finance person is to say out loud, at offer stage, whether the seat is expected to grow into the CFO role or report to one. Both are good jobs. Finding out two years in is what breaks them.
Growing into it inside the same company is the harder route. As I put it to a guest on Episode 9 of The CFO Track, “often the first CFO role isn’t necessarily with the same business, normally have to go elsewhere to get it.” That is one reason the CFO over the top is so common in this data, and why a first hire who does grow into the title, like the tech first hire I wrote about who built a function as the business scaled 20 times in four years, is worth so much to a founder.
Which first seats in tech most often get a CFO placed above them is in what Australian tech startups hire first.
Two tech companies where the second hire is the story
Two Australian software companies whose second and third finance hires say more than their first, told from public profile titles, public round announcements and the study sequence.
Neara
Four years on a virtual CFO, then a controller, then a CFO
- Business
- AI infrastructure modelling software for utilities (founded 2016)
- Rounds
- Series A, Apr 2021 (US$7.25M); Series B, Sep 2023 (US$24M); Series C, Oct 2024 (A$45M); Series D, Feb 2026 (A$90M)
- First finance hire
- Virtual CFO, Jan 2021, 3 months before the Series A
- Second finance hire
- Financial controller, Jun 2024 (41 months later)
- Third finance hire
- CFO, May 2025, 7 months after the Series C
- Now
- CFO, FP&A business partner, financial controller and an interim financial accountant in role (Sep 2026)
Neara builds AI software that models electricity networks and other physical infrastructure for utilities. Its first finance title is a virtual CFO from January 2021, three months before a US$7.25 million Series A. It is one of the rare cases where outsourced finance shows up in public records at all, and it ran for more than four years, through the Series A, a US$24 million Series B and an A$45 million Series C.
The second finance hire, and the first in-house finance role, was a financial controller in June 2024, nine months after the Series B and 41 months after the virtual CFO started. That is the long first gap the tech data predicts, stretched further by outside help. The third hire was an in-house CFO in May 2025, seven months after the Series C, and the virtual CFO arrangement ended the following month: a one-month handover.
After that the team filled in fast: an FP&A business partner in November 2025 and a new financial controller in December, ahead of an A$90 million Series D in February 2026. Three hires in four years, then two more within seven months of the CFO.
When an early-stage company does not have the volume for a full-time finance person, which is common, I refer founders to fractional providers for free. The arrangement has a natural end: the business outgrows the provider, and an in-house hire takes over. The handover month matters as much as the hire.
The takeaway for a founderA virtual CFO can carry a software company a long way, but it leaves the second hire to do two jobs at once. Hire the in-house operator first, then the in-house CFO, and overlap them with the outgoing adviser.
CarExpert
A CFO first, and a finance manager under them seven months later
- Business
- Car reviews and marketplace platform (founded 2020)
- Rounds
- Series B, Oct 2023 (announcement), the first round both our searches confirmed
- First finance hire
- CFO, Sep 2023
- Against the round
- 1 month before
- Second finance hire
- Finance manager, Apr 2024 (7 months later)
- Now
- Both still in role (Sep 2026)
CarExpert runs car reviews, news and a vehicle marketplace. Its first finance hire was a CFO in September 2023, one month before a Series B announcement that, according to the report, came as the company was preparing for an IPO and an expansion into Asia.
A CFO hired into that moment is hired for capital, investors and listing readiness, not for the ledger. So the second hire went underneath: a finance manager in April 2024, seven months after the CFO, well inside the median 15-month gap for tech. Both are still in their seats today.
This is the most common direction of travel in the tech data: the second hire is more junior than the first in 34 of 64 cases, and a CFO followed by a finance manager or controller is one of the most frequent first-and-second pairings we recorded.
What a first CFO usually inherits or builds early is a small team: a bookkeeper, an assistant accountant, and a financial controller or head of finance. Finance stays lean for a long time.
The takeaway for a founderWhen the first hire is the CFO, the second is almost always someone to do the work underneath. Budget for it within the first year, or the CFO ends up doing the month end.
How tech compares
| Cut | Months, first to second hire | Second hire below the first | Exactly one finance hire |
|---|---|---|---|
| All startups | 16 (n=156) | 77 of 156 | 35 of 191 |
| Tech (this page) | 15 (n=64) | 34 of 64 | 18 of 82 |
| Fintech | 15 (n=33) | 15 of 33 | 7 of 40 |
| Deep tech | 17 (n=47) | 23 of 47 | 5 of 52 |
The other tech benchmarks:
- Before or after the raise: when tech startups hire finance
- How long after a raise tech startups hire finance
- What tech startups hire first in finance
How the finance team usually takes shape is in finance team structure for a startup, and the CFO decision in when to hire a CFO.
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.
Common questions
When do Australian tech startups make their second finance hire?
A median 15 months after the first, across 64 funded Australian software and internet startups we tracked that have made a second finance hire. Of the 70 whose first hire was at least two years ago, 41 (59%) had a second finance hire within 24 months. Each later hire tends to come sooner: 11 months from the second to the third (n=46), and 7 months to the fourth and the fifth.
Is a tech startup's second finance hire usually more senior or more junior?
More often junior. Of 64 second hires at the tech companies we tracked, 34 were at a lower level than the first hire, 20 at a higher level and 10 at the same level. The single most common second hire was an accountant or FP&A analyst (17), followed by a CFO (15).
How many finance people does a tech startup have at Series B?
Among the 24 tech companies we tracked that have reached Series B or later, the median has made 6 finance hires over its life and 15 of 24 have made five or more. At Series A the median is 3 (n=37), and at seed or earlier it is 2 (n=21). These count hires made, not the team on the payroll today.
When does a CFO arrive over the top of the first finance hire in tech?
Of 24 CFOs hired over a below-CFO first hire at the tech companies we tracked, 11 started while the first hire was still in the seat, 11 after that person had already left, and 2 cannot be placed because the first hire's dates are recorded to the year only. A CFO over the top of someone still there is the brief that needs the most care at offer stage.
References
- What I see regularly after a first finance hire lands: around six months in, they introduce the founder to someone they worked with at their last business. That person gets hired, performs well, and the first hire’s credibility goes up further.
- From the briefs I take: general ledger, accounts payable and receivable and reconciliations are increasingly automated or offshored, and early stage businesses are not really hiring at that level anymore.
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.