VP, Business Development

Job description

The opportunity Autonomous wet labs are not a mature category. There is no established buyer journey, no standard contract structure, no obvious comp-set to anchor pricing against. The companies that will benefit most from what Substrate is building, including frontier AI labs, AI-native biotechs, and established pharma organisations, are only beginning to work out how experimental data at scale fits into their development pipelines. The VP of Business Development is the person who will work through that with them. This is Substrate's first dedicated commercial hire. The founding team has established early traction and a signed first commercial commitment, but the commercial function is, essentially, unbuilt. You will own it end to end: the relationships, the pipeline, the deal structures, the go-to-market motion, and the positioning work that makes Substrate comprehensible and compelling to each of the distinct customer archetypes in our ecosystem. About Substrate Substrate is building and operating a network of fully autonomous wet laboratories. We are the critical infrastructure layer for AI-driven biological discovery: cloud-based data production facilities, tightly integrated with AI foundation models, that make high-quality experimental biology as accessible as compute. We are a small team, four co-founders and a founding hire class now building out, with venture funding and government grants, opening our first node in London and a second node in San Francisco in parallel. The work is hard and the timeline is compressed. We have two scientific verticals live (protein characterisation and functional genomics), a software platform that connects API calls to automated assay execution, and a commercial pipeline that spans foundation model labs, AI biotechs, pharmaceutical companies, and publicly funded research organisations. We are growing to roughly thirty people by early 2027. The role You will own Substrate's commercial function end to end. The immediate priority is converting the existing pipeline into signed agreements and establishing the account relationships that will define Substrate's first year of commercial operation. The longer-term priority is building a go-to-market motion that scales as we add nodes and verticals. The obvious operational pieces are real and important: managing a pipeline across six customer segments, running deal processe…