76% of funded Australian tech startups we tracked (62 of 82) made their first finance hire below CFO. No single title took more than a quarter: CFO 20, head of finance 19, financial controller 18, accountant 15, finance manager 10.
The first hire is usually not a CFO
When I saw these figures my first reaction was that they are pretty typical. Founders will not always get a CFO in first; it will be a financial controller, or someone at head of finance or VP of finance level.[1] Tech bears that out more than any sector in the study. Of the 82 funded Australian software and internet startups we tracked with a dated finance hire, 62 (76%) started below CFO.
| First finance hire | Tech | All startups |
|---|---|---|
| CFO | 20 (24%) | 56 (29%) |
| Head of finance or finance director | 19 (23%) | 44 (23%) |
| Financial controller | 18 (22%) | 36 (19%) |
| Accountant or FP&A analyst | 15 (18%) | 29 (15%) |
| Finance manager | 10 (12%) | 26 (14%) |
| Below CFO, all titles | 62 (76%) | 135 (71%) |
The top three are almost level: CFO, head of finance and financial controller each account for roughly a quarter of tech first hires. That is the finding. There is no default first finance hire in Australian software, so any guide that tells you “hire a controller first” or “hire a CFO first” is giving you a preference, not a benchmark.
The difference between the two most common below-CFO seats matters. When I was asked on a podcast to explain it, I put it this way:
“Financial controller is more around as in the name, financial controls and compliance and reporting, where a head of finance is probably going to be a little bit more broadly across the forward-looking tasks. Like financial modeling or FP&A... Or the budgeting and forecasting component.”
A tech company that needs clean month-end numbers and an audit that does not hurt wants the first. A tech company about to raise, with a board asking for a forecast that holds, wants the second.
Whichever it is, do not brief it as a bookkeeper. As I wrote about one candidate who built a tech company’s finance function from almost nothing while it grew 20 times in four years, your first finance person is not a bookkeeper: they build the reporting frameworks, the compliance structure and the systems that let you fundraise, acquire and scale without losing control.
What tech hires first at each stage
The mix moves with the moment the hire is made. The table groups each tech company by the last announced round before its first finance person started.
| First finance hire | Before any round (37) | After a seed (18) | After a Series A (17) | After Series B or later (5) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CFO | 13 | 2 | 4 | 1 |
| Head of finance or finance director | 5 | 7 | 5 | 1 |
| Financial controller | 9 | 1 | 6 | 0 |
| Finance manager | 4 | 5 | 1 | 0 |
| Accountant or FP&A analyst | 6 | 3 | 1 | 3 |
Three shapes come through. Before any round, the most common tech first hire is a CFO (13 of 37), often a founder bringing in a senior operator to stand in front of investors. After a seed round, the senior title almost disappears: 2 of 18 were a CFO, and the typical hire is a head of finance or a finance manager who can do everything at once. After a Series A, the controller comes back (6 of 17) alongside the head of finance (5 of 17), which fits a company whose new board wants reporting and controls it can rely on. The Series B column is only five companies and should not be read as a pattern.
How often a CFO follows, by starting seat
The first hire is rarely the last word. Of the 62 tech companies whose first finance hire was below CFO, 24 (39%) later hired a CFO, a median 23 months after the first hire (quartiles 10, 23 and 45 months). Across all startups it was 65 of 135 (48%) at a median 26 months, so tech adds a CFO over the top less often than the market. Where the first hire started matters a great deal:
| First hire | Later added a CFO | Median months to the CFO | CFO within three years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accountant or FP&A analyst | 9 of 15 | 24 | 5 of 14 |
| Finance manager | 7 of 10 | 21 | 4 of 8 |
| Financial controller | 4 of 18 | 44 | 0 of 12 |
| Head of finance or finance director | 4 of 19 | 14 | 2 of 10 |
| All below-CFO starts | 24 of 62 (39%) | 23 | 11 of 44 (25%) |
This is the most useful table on the page for a software founder, and it splits cleanly in two. When the first hire is junior, an accountant or a finance manager, a CFO usually follows: 16 of 25 did, at a median of about two years. That is the company that hired for the work in front of it and then bought the senior seat when the round and the board demanded it.
When the first hire is a controller or a head of finance, a CFO rarely follows in tech. Only 4 of 18 controller starts and 4 of 19 head of finance starts later added one, and of the 12 controller starts made at least three years ago, none had a CFO above them within three years. Two readings fit, and the data cannot separate them. One is that a strong controller or head of finance, with an outside CFO for the board work, genuinely carries a software company a very long way; in single-product SaaS that is what I see. The other is that some of those people were promoted into the CFO title inside the same company, which this study counts as no CFO at all.
When a CFO does arrive over a controller, it is usually because the job moved past what the controller was hired for. I often describe early-stage senior finance candidates as falling into three buckets, and the controller bucket is deep in accounting but limited on strategy or capital. A first hire from a head of finance or VP of finance background runs into the same ceiling more often than founders expect, and the company ends up hiring someone above them.[2]
For the moment a controller-led SaaS business does need the senior seat, see when a software startup needs a CFO.
When the first hire is a CFO
20 of 82 tech companies started with a CFO, and more than half of them later replaced that person: 11 of the 20 hired a second, different CFO. Of the 13 CFO first hires that have left with a known end date, the median stay was 21 months, and 7 of the 20 are still in the role. At least one of those first CFO titles was a fractional arrangement that was always going to hand over. Others were a CFO hired ahead of the job, which is the risk I raise with founders who want the title before the work exists.
How long tech first hires stay
| First hire | Still in the role | Median months, leavers |
|---|---|---|
| Head of finance or finance director | 8 of 19 | 24 (n=9) |
| CFO | 7 of 20 | 21 (n=13) |
| Financial controller | 6 of 18 | 24 (n=11) |
| Finance manager | 3 of 10 | 20 (n=6) |
| Accountant or FP&A analyst | 2 of 15 | 25 (n=13) |
| All tech first hires | 26 of 82 | 24 (n=52) |
Plan for about two years. That is the median stay for a tech first finance hire who leaves, and of the 64 tech first hires made at least three years ago, only 14 are still in the seat. The head of finance is the tier most likely to still be there (8 of 19), and the accountant least (2 of 15), which is what you would expect: the junior first hire is the one most often overtaken as the function grows. Where they went next is known for 34 tech leavers: 18 moved at the same level, 10 left the finance track or took an executive role, 4 stepped down and 2 stepped up.
Where tech first hires come from
Tech hires its first finance person from other startups more than any other sector. 25 of 82 tech first hires (30%) came directly from another startup or scale-up, against 37 of 191 (19%) across the study. The rest came from private businesses outside tech (12), accounting, advisory or outsourced CFO firms (10), large corporates outside tech (10), listed tech companies (5), the Big Four (5) and investment firms (4), and 11 from elsewhere.
That startup bias is narrower than it needs to be. There is a misconception in startup land that your first finance hire needs to have come from a startup. I caught up recently with the head of finance of one of Australia’s most exciting health tech businesses, who came straight out of a large corporate as its first finance hire and, three years in, had raised capital and built the whole function beneath them. What matters is how someone thinks when there is no playbook, not the size of the business they came from.
What software founders do screen for, rightly, is fluency in the model. When a finance manager asked me how to move from professional services into a SaaS scale-up, I told them to learn the metrics before walking into the room: ARR and MRR, churn, CAC payback, gross margin and net revenue retention, and what the interactions between them mean. SaaS founders do not expect a candidate to have done the exact job before. They expect them to understand the business well enough to have an intelligent conversation about it.
The accounting and outsourced CFO firms are worth a second look. 10 of 82 tech first hires came straight from a firm that sells finance as a service, which is often how a company converts the virtual CFO it has relied on into its first employee. And 7 of 82 tech first hires are visibly fractional, part-time or interim in their own title, which is a floor.
Three first seats: a CFO, an accountant and a controller
Three recent Australian software companies that started in three different seats, told from public profile titles, public round announcements and the study sequence.
Eucalyptus
A founding CFO, and a seat that outgrew the first holder
- Business
- Direct-to-patient telehealth brands (founded 2019)
- Rounds
- Series B, Jul 2021 (A$30M), the first round both our searches confirmed; A$50M, May 2023
- First finance hire
- CFO, Feb 2019
- Against the first confirmed round
- 29 months before
- Next finance hires
- Finance director for one brand, Jan 2020; graduate accountant, May 2020; group financial controller, Nov 2020
- Later
- Founding CFO left Feb 2023; a new CFO started Jan 2024; 17 finance hires in all
Eucalyptus started in 2019 and runs direct-to-patient health brands, and its first finance hire was a CFO in February 2019, the year it was founded. That is the highest seat, taken at the earliest point, in a company that its founding CFO has described on the podcast as raising capital almost every six months.
The function then built out beneath the CFO rather than above: a finance director for one of its brands in January 2020, a group financial controller that November, and a run of accountants for property, inventory and operations. The first round both of our searches confirmed was a A$30 million Series B in July 2021, so by the time the company was raising at that stage it had carried a CFO for more than two years.
The founding CFO left in February 2023 and a new CFO started in January 2024. In all we count 17 finance hires. It is a finance story worth studying, not a verdict on the order it hired in.
Eucalyptus’s founding CFO was my guest on The CFO Track. What stayed with me is that he left because the business grew, not because it struggled: the role narrowed, better-suited people came in, and he recognised he was no longer the right person for it. As he put it in one clip: “In Eucalyptus as it became bigger and bigger that CFO role started to narrow down.”
The takeaway for a founderA CFO as the very first hire works when the business will need strategic finance from day one. Expect the seat to change around that person as the company scales, and talk about it early.
AutoGrab
An accountant first, then the CFO with the Series A
- Business
- Automotive data and pricing software (founded 2020)
- Rounds
- Series A, Oct 2023 (US$4.5M); Series B, Jan 2026 (A$80M)
- First finance hire
- Senior financial accountant, Jan 2023
- Against the first round
- 9 months before
- Next finance hire
- CFO, Jan 2024, 3 months after the Series A
- Now
- CFO still in role; six finance hires in all
AutoGrab supplies vehicle data and pricing intelligence to the automotive trade. Its first finance person was a senior financial accountant in January 2023, nine months before the Series A was announced in October 2023: someone to get the records, the month end and the numbers into shape ahead of investors.
The CFO came in January 2024, three months after the round, and is still in the seat. Beneath the CFO, AutoGrab added financial accountants in 2024 and 2025 and a group finance manager for strategy and analytics in February 2026, the month after an A$80 million Series B to fund expansion into the UK and Europe.
This is the accountant-then-CFO route. In the tech data it is the start most likely to get a CFO above it: 9 of the 15 tech companies that started with an accountant or analyst later hired a CFO.
A point I make often: founders under-hire more than they over-hire, pricing the role against today’s complexity rather than the complexity twelve months out. Starting junior works when you plan the senior hire deliberately, as here.
The takeaway for a founderStarting with a hands-on accountant is a sound first step if you already know the CFO is coming. Tell your first hire at offer stage where the senior seat will sit.
Updoc
A financial controller 18 months before the seed
- Business
- Telehealth (founded 2021)
- Rounds
- Seed, May 2024 (A$20M)
- First finance hire
- Financial controller, Nov 2022
- Against the first round
- 18 months before
- Next finance hire
- Senior finance manager, Mar 2026
- Tenure of the first hire
- 29 months (left Apr 2025)
Updoc is a telehealth provider founded in 2021. Its first finance hire was a financial controller in November 2022, 18 months before its first announced round, a A$20 million seed in May 2024. For a company taking patient payments and running a clinical service, controls and compliance were the first finance job, and that is the controller’s job.
The controller stayed 29 months and left in April 2025, close to the two-year median stay of a tech first hire. The next finance hire we can see is a senior finance manager in March 2026.
That makes Updoc a clean example of the controller start in tech: one senior operational hire running finance alone for more than two years, with no CFO above them. It matches the pattern in the table above, where only 4 of 18 controller-first tech companies later hired a CFO.
The classic first hire at this size is a financial controller who does a bit of everything at the top end, with an outsourced bookkeeper for payables, reconciliations and payroll. It is the most common model I see, and it works.
The takeaway for a founderA controller is the right first seat when the need is clean books and compliance. Plan what sits beside or above that person before the business outgrows the brief.
What I see in tech
The first finance hire in a tech business is a problem solver before anything else. The briefs I take for them cover month-end close, billing operations, the R&D tax claim and the forecast, and increasingly the job of automating the transactional work so the team stays small.[3] That changes what I screen for. On Celia’s Corner I said:
“The way AI is going, it can start to do a lot of that already. So technical skill set is no longer the moat or the weapon that people think it is anymore.”
The mistake I see most in tech is not hiring too senior. It is hiring too junior, pricing the role against this year’s complexity and then hiring again when the person cannot scale. I broke down what each first-hire budget actually buys for a founder who had been quoted two different numbers: at $120k to $140k you get a senior accountant with a controller title, and you still lead finance yourself; at $140k to $160k, a finance manager or financial controller who can own the function; at $180k to $200k and above, someone who has been the first finance hire before and will not need replacing in 18 months. The data above is the other side of that coin: a junior first hire in tech is the start most likely to have a CFO put over the top of it. If you know you will need the senior seat within two years, brief for someone who can grow into it, or plan the CFO hire now and tell your first hire at offer stage.
For a single-product SaaS business, my default recommendation is a controller or head of finance inside, with a fractional CFO outside until the business gets more complex: a second product, a second country, or institutional money on the board.
How tech compares
| Cut | First hire is a CFO | First hire below CFO | Below-CFO starts that later added a CFO |
|---|---|---|---|
| All startups | 56 of 191 (29%) | 135 of 191 (71%) | 65 of 135 (48%), median 26 mo |
| Tech (this page) | 20 of 82 (24%) | 62 of 82 (76%) | 24 of 62 (39%), median 23 mo |
| Fintech | 10 of 40 (25%) | 30 of 40 (75%) | 15 of 30 (50%), median 32 mo |
| Deep tech | 20 of 52 (38%) | 32 of 52 (62%) | 21 of 32 (66%), median 18 mo |
The other tech benchmarks:
- Before or after the raise: when tech startups hire finance
- How long after a raise tech startups hire finance
- The second finance hire in tech
For the hiring process itself, see how to hire a CFO and 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
What should a tech startup's first finance hire be?
There is no default in the data. Of 82 funded Australian software and internet startups we tracked, the first finance hire was a CFO in 20 (24%), a head of finance or finance director in 19 (23%), a financial controller in 18 (22%), an accountant or FP&A analyst in 15 (18%) and a finance manager in 10 (12%). 62 of 82 (76%) started below CFO. The right seat depends on what the business needs the next 12 to 24 months, not on the round label.
Should a SaaS startup hire a CFO or a financial controller first?
Most tech companies in our data started below CFO, and a single-product SaaS business can often run on a strong financial controller inside with a fractional CFO outside until around Series B. A financial controller owns controls, compliance and reporting; a head of finance also takes the forward-looking work: modelling, budgeting and forecasting.
How often does a tech startup's first finance hire end up with a CFO above them?
Of the 62 tech companies we tracked whose first finance hire was below CFO, 24 (39%) later hired a CFO, a median 23 months after the first hire. It varied by starting seat: 9 of 15 accountant starts and 7 of 10 finance manager starts later added a CFO, against 4 of 18 controller starts and 4 of 19 head of finance starts. Internal promotions to CFO are not counted, so these are floors.
How long does a tech startup's first finance hire stay?
Of 82 first finance hires at the tech companies we tracked, 26 are still in the role. Among the 52 who have left and whose end date is known, the median tenure was 24 months. Of the 64 first hires made at least three years ago, 14 are still there.
References
- What I told the team behind this study when I saw the title mix: that is pretty typical. Founders will not always get a CFO in first. It will be someone else, at financial controller or VP of finance and head of finance level.
- A pattern I see often in tech: the first hire is a VP of finance or a head of finance rather than a CFO, and many of those people are not able to step into the CFO role as the business grows, so the company ends up hiring someone above them.
- What a good first finance hire in a tech business actually does, from the briefs I take: month-end close, financial reviews, billing operations, the R&D tax claim, the FP&A work, and in tech these days, automating as much of the transactional work as they can with AI tools.
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.