Founders Associate

Job description

ABOUT ZELARA Current CRM marketing is broken. It blasts generic messages at scale and calls it "personalization." Our founders lived this problem in leading positions at HelloFresh, Salesforce, Uber, and others. Backed by top-tier VCs, they decided to fix it. Zelara is an AI lifecycle marketing system that learns from every customer interaction and continuously improves how brands communicate at the individual level. Built on top of existing CRM infrastructure, it replaces static journeys and manual segmentation with a reinforcement learning engine that generates content, makes individual-level decisions, and gets smarter with every outcome. Enterprise customers already see up to 70% significant conversion lift. We closed one of the largest pre-seed rounds in European SaaS history, are generating revenue with paying enterprise customers, and are seeing strong market pull. Now we are building the team to scale. THE ROLE As Founders Associate at Zelara, you will work side by side with our Co-Founders in our Berlin office. This is a high-impact, generalist role at the core of how the company operates. You will take ownership of company operations, financial planning, fundraising, and hiring — the critical building blocks that allow the founding team to focus on product and growth. You will operate with an AI-first mindset, applying technology to solve challenges and accelerate our impact. While you will contribute across the business, your core projects will be aligned with your unique strengths. We encourage candidates with strong analytical or operational backgrounds to apply, as the role will be shaped to leverage your expertise in building Zelara. What You Will Do Own company operations: structure internal processes and keep the founding team organized and focused. Build and maintain financial models — forecasts, scenario planning, unit economics. Lead grant and funding applications from research through submission. Drive hiring end-to-end: define roles, source candidates, manage pipelines, and build the foundations of our talent strategy. Develop data-driven narratives and materials to support internal reporting, investor relations, and future fundraising. Over time, help translate user feedback and AI research into product insights that influence the development roadmap. YOUR DAY-TO-DAY Your work will be dynamic and tied to the founders' priorities. No t…