Founding Sales @Verso (backed by Hexa)

Founded in 2025 by Lydia Bellahouel (CEO) and Camille Epitalon (CTO), Verso is backed by Hexa (eFounders), the pioneer European startup studio behind 40+ companies including Front, Aircall and Spendesk.

Consumer research has been slow and expensive for decades. We are building the company that changes that, and we need our first commercial hire: the person who brings our product to enterprise customers, closes our first flagship accounts, and helps define how Verso sells

Verso is an AI-native consumer research platform. Our AI designs the study, interviews real participants one to one over video in any language, and turns those conversations into a structured, evidence-backed report you can interrogate in chat. Days instead of weeks, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional agency, without trading rigor for speed.

We sell to insights, marketing and innovation teams at global brands, with a strong pull from large CPG, beauty, telecom, retail, and the strategy consultancies that serve them. Early clients include Orange, Michelin, Europcar and dsm-firmenich. We are a small team with high standards and one clear thesis: qualitative research is high-signal and badly broken, and AI is finally good enough to fix it.

We start with AI-moderated qualitative research and are building for each client a system of consumer intelligence: every study compounds into a living understanding of their consumers that their teams, and their own AI, can draw on over time.

Lydia spent 7 years at BCG leading AI-powered transformation for consumer brands and knows the buyer's pain from the inside. Camille is an AI expert and a pioneer in agentic systems. Together they built Verso to turn consumer understanding into a real-time advantage for the brands we serve.

The role

We are hiring our Founding Sales, the first dedicated commercial hire at Verso.

This is a hands-on, full-cycle role, and you work hand in hand with the founders, Lydia in particular, who leads commercial today. You prospect, run demos, scope pilots, and close enterprise contracts yourself. As we grow, you help define how Verso sells and have the opportunity to build and lead the commercial team.

To be clear on the shape of it: you close deals now, and you grow into running the function next. This is not a co-founder seat, it is the first commercial hire, with real room to make the role your own. If you want the leadership part without the selling part, this is not it.

What you will own

• From first meeting to signes customer. You work closely with our Founding GTM, who builds demand across outbound, inbound and events. You generate pipeline together, while also leveraging your own network and converting inbound opportunities into customers.

• The sales process itself. You turn founder-led selling into something repeatable: the motion, the collateral, the CRM discipline, the qualification bar, the pricing conversation. You decide what good looks like and write it down so the next hire can run it.

• Enterprise relationships. Our buyers are Heads of Insights and research leaders who buy on trust, not on a feature list. You build that trust, turn a first pilot into an annual program, and grow accounts study by study.

• AI-driven selling. You use AI across your own workflow, from research and prospecting to follow-ups and proposals, and you sell a product that is itself AI-native. You are fluent enough to demo it credibly and to make the "rigor, not hype" case to a skeptical researcher.

• Voice of the customer. You are closest to the market and bring structured feedback to the founders, helping shape what we build next.

Who you are

• You have 5+ years of experience in enterprise B2B sales and have personally closed complex, consultative deals. You know how to navigate long, multi-stakeholder buying cycles and turn initial projects into long-term customer relationships.

• You run the full cycle without a playbook handed to you, and you are comfortable being the person who writes it.

• You are genuinely fluent with AI tools and curious about the product. You can hold your own in a conversation about how the AI interviewer actually works.

• You can talk method with a Head of Insights and business impact with a CMO, and move between the two in the same meeting.

• You are fluent in French and English.

• Experience in the insights industry is a strong plus. You may already know how researchers think and buy, or you may have a track record of ramping quickly into complex enterprise categories and earning credibility fast.

This role is for you if

• You want to be the first commercial hire and help shape how we sell, not inherit a territory and a quota.

• You are frustrated by how slow and expensive research still is, and you want to sell something genuinely different.

• You like closing deals yourself and you want the path from there to leading the function.

This role is not for you if

• You want a defined territory, a fixed playbook, and a predictable inbound pipeline.

• You need a team under you on day one rather than earning it.

• You see AI as an incremental feature rather than a real shift in how research gets done.

What makes this role unusual

• You work directly with the founders, Lydia in particular, and help turn founder-led selling into a real commercial motion.

• You take a differentiated product to a market that has mostly not seen it yet, in a category being defined right now.

• You have a real say in the roadmap, because you are the closest read we have on the market.

• The trajectory is built in: start by closing, grow into leading the commercial team.