Founding GTM Operator

ABOUT THE JOB Founding go-to-market role at a fast growing, venture-backed B2B AI startup. Own our growth engine end-to-end. Position: Founding GTM Operator (Full-Time) Reporting to: CEO Location: San Francisco (4 days/week in person) Compensation: $90,000-$110,000 base salary, plus your choice of equity or a bonus linked to company revenue (bonus expected to be $10,000+ for this role). COMPANY OVERVIEW Lenders spend over $24B every year hiring agents to perform manual, repetitive servicing work. Existing AI solutions try to automate this, but they treat regulatory guardrails as an afterthought - meaning they can’t guarantee compliance and can’t be trusted with critical servicing workflows. Kato takes a different approach. Regulations aren’t an afterthought - they’re the foundation. We start with a regulatory rules system and layer an AI decision engine on top. With this architecture, we’re building an AI-powered servicing platform that automates critical workflows across every channel with full compliance and best-in-class recoveries. We are starting today with a compliance first Voice AI agent that handles outbound and inbound loan servicing calls. We have grown ARR 6x this year and are already in production with major names in the fintech lending space like Bilt Rewards https://biltrewards.com/, Bluevine https://www.bluevine.com/ and Parafin https://www.parafin.com/. Kato is founded by a team with deep operating expertise in financial services and software engineering: - Pratik Risbud https://www.linkedin.com/in/pratikrisbud/ (CEO/Co-Founder): Former Investment Banker at Goldman Sachs and led Credit/Operations at Brex - David Zhu https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-y-zhu/ (CTO/Co-Founder): Former Software Engineer at Google and Engineering Manager at Brex Kato is backed by institutional capital from Pear VC and angel investors from top tech companies such as Brex, Bridge, and Square. THE ROLE We already know how to find and close customers. We are now hiring our Founding GTM Operator: a generalist who owns demand generation and turns our go-to-market into a repeatable growth engine. This is one of the most critical hires at Kato and you'll work directly with the CEO. On the outbound and conference side, that means getting sharper and more sophisticated about how we find customers - tracking the right buying signals, testing new plays, and expanding our conference presence. And on the brand side, it’s wide open. We want to turn Kato into a household name in the lending space. You'll own building our presence from scratch: events, webinars, LinkedIn posts, newsletters, blogs. When someone in this industry thinks about AI for servicing & collections, we want them to think of Kato first. Across both, we don't just want someone who can run the motion - we want someone who builds the system behind it, using AI and automation to take out as much manual work as possible. This role is a fit if you have 1-3 years of experience and: - You are a former founder, or owned GTM / growth at an early-stage startup - You have done either sales development (SDR/BDR) or demand-focused marketing (MDR, field or event marketing) - a role where you were measured on pipeline/revenue. This role is not a fit if: - If your background is analytics / data focused without direct exposure to revenue - If your background is pure brand or content marketing measured on reach and impressions KEY RESPONSIBILITIES OUTBOUND & LEAD GENERATION (50%) - Build and maintain a comprehensive database of the lending market - Own end-to-end outbound: research, list building, copy, multi-channel outreach (email + LinkedIn), message refining - Create and manage nurture campaigns for older or dormant leads - Run Kato’s conference efforts (e.g. outreach, marketing campaigns, booths) - Systematize relentlessly - automate list building, signal tracking, personalization, and sequencing wherever you can with AI and other tooling CONTENT & MARKETING (30%) - Define Kato’s content stra