Business Development Lead, AI

As Business Development Lead for AI at Monad Foundation, you own the ecosystem at the intersection of AI infrastructure, agentic applications, and onchain markets. You build relationships with AI founders, venture firms, and compute providers, turning those relationships into early-stage teams building and launching on Monad. Your focus is where AI meets onchain markets: tradable compute, agentic payments, and the capital markets forming around them.

What you'll do

• Own sourcing and activation by building Monad's presence in San Francisco through founders and the wider AI community, developing the existing pipeline, sourcing new teams, and owning qualification, follow-up, deployment, and launch.
• Build venture and capital relationships with venture firms and crypto-native capital, turning introductions into qualified opportunities and teams building on Monad.
• Drive the compute-markets strategy by recruiting protocols, index providers, curators, liquidity providers, compute operators, and trading partners, and developing collaborations around compute index vaults, lending against tokenized compute, and hedging products that bring liquidity and volume to Monad.
• Drive agentic payments by finding and activating teams building agent-driven and stablecoin payments, including x402 and emerging payment models, and converting integrations into real transaction activity.
• Structure and close collaborations by understanding each business, making the case for Monad, and negotiating commercial arrangements across company stages, connecting traditional financial structuring with onchain execution and settlement.
• Turn strategy into measurable outcomes by coordinating technical, ecosystem, DeFi, communications, and legal support, setting priorities and milestones, removing launch blockers, and tracking live products, users, payments, liquidity, and sustained volume.

What you bring

• A track record of closing and launching business development or strategic partnerships from initial conversation to working product, including with growth or late-stage businesses.
• Strong AI and compute relationships, understanding AI business models and the ability to bring together founders, venture investors, GPU providers, neoclouds, trading firms, and market makers.
• Founder empathy and follow-through: you can explain why Monad matters to a partner, earn trust, bring in technical expertise, and sustain momentum through complex integration.
• Autonomy and judgment to build your own pipeline, prioritize real use cases, set clear success and failure criteria, and stop investing in weak opportunities while collaborating with low ego and staying effective without a playbook.
• Location in San Francisco, where you want to build relationships in person and spend time with the AI, compute, and crypto communities across the Bay Area.

About Monad Foundation

Monad Foundation is a core contributor to the Monad blockchain, a performant and parallel EVM Layer 1 designed to power onchain finance and decentralized applications globally.