Of 40 funded Australian fintechs we tracked, 22 (55%) had a finance person in place before their first announced round, a median 15 months ahead of it. The other 18 (45%) hired after it, a median 21 months later.
The benchmark: a slight lean to hiring before the money
A first finance hire is the first person a company employs whose job is finance: a CFO, a head of finance or finance director, a financial controller, a finance manager or an accountant. Across the 40 funded fintechs we tracked, that person was already in the business before the first round was announced in 22 cases. In the other 18 they arrived afterwards.
| Timing of the first finance hire | Fintech (n=40) | Fintech median months (middle half) | All startups (n=191) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before the first announced round | 22 (55%) | 15 ahead (6 to 34), n=22 | 100 (52%), 17 ahead |
| After the first announced round | 18 (45%) | 21 after (12 to 28), n=18 | 91 (48%), 18 after |
That is close to even, and the evenness is the point. The median across all 40 fintechs is a first finance hire two months before the first round, which describes almost none of them: the ones who hired early did so more than a year ahead, and the ones who hired late waited well over a year. If you want a benchmark for your own company, first work out which of the two groups you are in.
The early group matches what I hear from fintech founders going to market. They want someone in the seat to get the numbers, the data room and the house in order before investors start asking questions, usually because founder-led finance has stopped working: a board question the founder could not answer, or cash visibility they no longer trusted. Sometimes that someone is an outside adviser, who would not show up in this data at all. The 22 in the early group are the ones who put an employee in the seat.
Fintech hires finance sooner after founding than any other sector
The clearest fintech signal is not about the round at all. It is about the calendar. The median fintech in the study made its first finance hire 2.3 years after it was founded (n=34). The median software company took 4.0 years (n=76) and the median deep tech company 3.6 (n=50). Across all startups it was 3.5 (n=176). Six fintechs whose first finance role is dated before their recorded founding date are left out of that figure, because a predecessor entity or a wrong founding year would distort it.
The reason is in the product. When I was asked on a podcast why fintech is different, I put it this way:
“With Fintech, depending on the type of Fintech, because there’s like non-bank lending or there’s payments, which are very capital intensive. Like there’s a lot of money going through it. So you will need someone a little bit sooner because the operations of the business is finance itself.”
Lending and payments hire earliest
That view is testable, so we tested it. We split the 40 fintechs by what the product does, read from each company’s own description: 24 whose product is lending, credit or payments (money moving through the business every day) and 16 whose product is something else, such as trading and investing platforms, insurance, digital advice, broking, or infrastructure sold to banks.
| Fintech product | Companies | Hired finance before the first round | Median months, first round to first hire | Median years, founding to first hire |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lending, credit or payments | 24 | 15 of 24 | 5 before | 2.0 (n=19) |
| Everything else | 16 | 7 of 16 | 9 after | 3.8 (n=15) |
The companies that lend or move money hired earlier on both clocks: before the round more often, and about two years from founding instead of nearly four. The rest of fintech looks much more like a software company. It is a small split and our own classification, but it runs the way I described it on Celia’s Corner: in lending, as in deep tech and robotics, the first finance hire often comes in around the seed round, is often a head of finance rather than a CFO, and spends the first months setting up the financial controls that messy early accounting never had. When the product is financing, the finance function arrives with the product.
Who had finance in place at each round
The first table uses each company’s first round. This one asks a different question: when a fintech announced a seed, a Series A or a Series B or later, did it already have an internal finance hire? Each fintech counts once per stage it reached.
| Stage | Fintech | All startups | Tech | Deep tech |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 6 of 14 (43%) | 25 of 70 (36%) | 10 of 35 (29%) | 8 of 17 (47%) |
| Series A | 10 of 22 (45%) | 64 of 113 (57%) | 30 of 50 (60%) | 21 of 34 (62%) |
| Series B or later | 12 of 17 (71%) | 50 of 64 (78%) | 19 of 24 (79%) | 16 of 18 (89%) |
The number to notice is Series A. Fintech is ahead of software at seed, then falls behind every other sector by the time a Series A is announced: 12 of the 22 fintechs we tracked that raised a Series A had not yet made an internal finance hire. Part of the reason is where fintechs start: for 13 of the 40, the first round we found was a Series A, so for those companies the Series A was the first money announced at all.
Read that figure carefully. It is 12 of 22 fintechs we tracked, and it counts internal hires only. A lot of fintechs run their finance through an outsourced or fractional provider for years, and that provider never shows up in public employment records. The same caution applies at Series B or later, where 5 of the 17 fintechs we tracked had not yet made an internal finance hire when that round was announced. Across the whole study, 11 of the 14 companies in that position hired within 9 months of the round.
If you have already raised and have nobody in finance yet, the clock from each round to the first hire is in how long Australian fintechs take to hire finance after a raise.
How three recent Australian fintechs timed it
Two fintechs that hired before their first round and one that hired after, from the study’s case set. Titles and months are read from public profiles and announced rounds; people are not named. These are sequences, not recommendations.
Block Earner
Crypto-backed lending and yield products, founded 2021
- Rounds
- Seed Dec 2021; Series A Aug 2025
- First finance hire
- Financial accountant, August 2021
- Against the first round
- 4 months before the seed
- Next finance hires
- Head of finance Jan 2022; a part-time head of finance Mar 2024; finance manager Apr 2026
- Status now
- Raised its Series A in August 2025
Block Earner lends against crypto and offers yield products, so money moves through it from the first customer. It was founded in 2021 and had a financial accountant in place by August 2021, four months before its seed round was announced in December.
The step up came straight after the money: a head of finance in January 2022, one month after the seed. A hands-on hire to get the numbers ready, then a leader once the round closed. The company went on to announce its Series A in August 2025 and added a finance manager eight months later.
The signs that founder-led finance has run its course are always obvious in hindsight: the financial model becomes a scramble, cash conversations are a guess, and nobody can say which version of the forecast is live. I listed them on LinkedIn.
The takeaway for a founderYou do not need a senior hire to be “finance before the round”. Someone to get the books investor-ready, then a level up once the money lands, is a sequence that works for a lender at seed.
Zepto
Account-to-account merchant payments, founded 2018
- Rounds
- Series A Mar 2022
- First finance hire
- Director of finance (part-time), April 2020
- Against the first round
- 23 months before the Series A
- Next finance hires
- Head of finance Aug 2021; FP&A analyst Dec 2021; senior finance manager Apr 2022; CFO Jan 2023
- Coverage
- Name too common to search cleanly; a floor
Zepto moves money directly between bank accounts for merchants. Its first finance title on the public record is a part-time director of finance in April 2020, almost two years before its Series A was announced in March 2022.
A permanent head of finance followed in August 2021, seven months ahead of the round, and an FP&A analyst in December. So by the time the Series A was announced Zepto had a small finance team, not just a person. The build continued after it: a senior finance manager the following month and a CFO in January 2023, ten months after the round.
Senior cover can start part-time. Zepto bought a finance director’s judgement two years before its first announced round and added a permanent head of finance well before the round landed.
Stake
Retail share trading and brokerage, founded 2017
- Rounds
- Raise Jul 2019; Series A May 2021; second Series A Apr 2022
- First finance hires
- Group financial controller and financial accountant, both 2021
- Against the first round
- About two years after it
- Next finance hires
- Finance manager Nov 2021; 15 finance hires in total
- Dating
- The controller is dated to the year only, so which of the two came first is not known
Stake runs a share trading platform for retail investors. It announced its first raise in July 2019, and the first finance title we could find is a group financial controller in 2021, about two years later.
2021 is also the year of its Series A, and the function then arrived in a rush: a financial accountant in August, a finance manager in November and two more hires by March 2022. Stake has made 15 finance hires in all, with a finance director and later a head of finance at the top. It is the clearest example among these fintechs of the “hired after” pattern: a long quiet period, then a build that tracks the money.
Raising first and building finance afterwards is a legitimate order for a platform business. When the build comes, plan for a team, not a person.
What I see in fintech
Three things from the briefs I take, set against the data.
Which kind of fintech you are matters more than the round. A lender or a payments company has money running through it from the first customer, so the operations are finance, and it needs someone who owns that early. The lending and payments split above is the data version of that. The rest of fintech, on these numbers, behaves more like software.
Hiring before the round is usually about readiness. Most of the fintechs that hired early did not hire a CFO: 14 of the 22 started below CFO. They were putting someone in the seat to get the numbers in order before investors looked. And the runway to the next round is longer than it used to be: as I noted in my Q1 2026 market read, companies are raising earlier than ever at pre-seed but taking nearly twice as long to reach the scale-up zone, so a finance hire made before the first round may carry the company a long way.
The title you hire first is a separate decision. Most fintechs that hired first did not hire a CFO first. What they hired, and how long each kind of first hire stayed, is on the fintech what-to-hire-first benchmark.
Compare: before or after the first round, by sector
| Cut | Hired before the first round | Founding to first hire |
|---|---|---|
| Fintech (this page) | 22 of 40 (55%) | 2.3 years (n=34) |
| All startups | 100 of 191 (52%) | 3.5 years (n=176) |
| Tech | 37 of 82 (45%) | 4.0 years (n=76) |
| Deep tech | 33 of 52 (63%) | 3.6 years (n=50) |
Before or after the first raise, in the other cuts: All startups, Tech, Deep tech.
Fintech, the other three questions: How long after a raise, What to hire first, The second finance hire. All of them sit in the finance hiring benchmarks series.
For the signs that a fintech has reached the point of needing a CFO rather than a head of finance, I set out when a fintech needs a CFO.
Common questions
Do Australian fintechs hire finance before or after their first raise?
Slightly more before than after. Of the 40 funded Australian fintechs in Story Recruitment's study, 22 (55%) had a finance person in place before their first announced round, a median 15 months ahead of it. The other 18 (45%) hired after it, a median 21 months later.
How soon after founding does a fintech hire its first finance person?
Sooner than any other sector we tracked. The median fintech made its first finance hire 2.3 years after founding (n=34), against 4.0 years in software and internet (n=76) and 3.6 years in deep tech (n=50).
Do lending and payments fintechs hire finance earlier?
In our data, yes. Of the 24 fintechs whose product is lending, credit or payments, 15 had a finance hire before their first announced round. Of the 16 whose product is something else, such as trading, insurance, advice or infrastructure sold to banks, 7 did. It is a small, hand-classified split, so read it as a direction, not a rate.
How many fintechs reach Series A or Series B without a finance hire?
Of the 22 fintechs we tracked that raised a Series A, 12 had not yet made an internal finance hire when it was announced. Of the 17 that reached Series B or later, 5 had not. Many of those will have had an outsourced or fractional CFO, which never appears in public employment records, so these are counts of companies without an internal hire, not companies with nobody doing finance.
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. 40 companies, all with a dated finance hire. “Before the first round” compares the start month of the earliest finance hire with the announcement month of the earliest round both searches found. The stage table counts a company at a stage if it had an internal finance hire before the first round of that stage was announced. The lending and payments split is Story Recruitment’s own reading of each company’s described product.
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.