VP Sales

Your mission

At AVIAN, our mission is clear: we stop fires before they start. Our infrared camera systems and AI-driven monitoring help industrial companies detect abnormal heat early, prevent fire risk, protect assets, and avoid costly downtime.

We have reached product-market fit. We have the product, the proof, and strong customer demand. Now we need the sales engine.

As VP Sales, your mission is to turn AVIAN from a founder-led sales organization into a scalable, repeatable revenue machine. You will own our commercial growth, build the sales team, close strategic accounts, and create the operating system that gets us to $10M+ ARR.

You will:

• Own new ARR, expansion ARR, pipeline, forecasting, and sales execution.
• Build our sales playbook across ICP, qualification, discovery, ROI case, pricing, pilot structure, procurement, and handoff to implementation.
• Personally close strategic accounts in high-risk industrial sectors such as manufacturing, wood processing, recycling, paper, logistics, and related verticals.
• Recruit, coach, and manage our first full sales team.
• Build a disciplined sales cadence across CRM, pipeline reviews, deal inspection, forecasting, and performance management.
• Work closely with marketing to turn outbound, inbound, trade fairs, content, and case studies into qualified pipeline.
• Develop partner channels with insurers, brokers, fire-protection experts, integrators, and industry associations.
• Bring customer feedback back into product, engineering, and operations.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will sell, build, travel, negotiate, coach, and execute.

Your profile

You are a commercial builder with strong sales leadership experience in a B2B startup or scale-up. You know how to create structure without slowing the team down.

Must-haves:

• Proven track record scaling B2B revenue in a startup or scale-up environment.
• Experience owning and exceeding revenue targets.
• Strong background in complex, technical B2B sales.
• Ability to sell to plant managers, maintenance leaders, safety teams, procurement, executives, and owners.
• Experience building sales processes from scratch.
• Strong hands-on sales ability across discovery, business case, negotiation, and closing.
• CRM discipline and experience with HubSpot, Salesforce, or similar.
• Clear forecasting, pipeline-management, and deal-inspection skills.
• Strong hiring and coaching ability.
• High ownership, direct communication, and bias for action.
• Fluent English.
• Willingness to travel for customers, partners, trade fairs, and team meetings.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience in industrial IoT, fire prevention, predictive maintenance, machine vision, automation, safety tech, insurance-tech, or hardware-enabled SaaS.
• Experience selling into manufacturing, wood processing, recycling, paper, logistics, or other high-risk industrial sectors.
• Experience building partner channels with insurers, brokers, integrators, OEMs, or fire-safety partners.
• Based in Zurich, Europe, or a major US industrial hub.

Why us?

AVIAN is building a new category in industrial fire prevention. Our product protects real facilities, real assets, and real people. The impact is immediate, measurable, and operationally critical.

You will join at the right stage: product-market fit is proven, customer demand is real, and the commercial organization is ready to scale. This is the opportunity to build the sales function from the ground up and directly shape how AVIAN grows.

What we offer:

• Direct reporting line to the CEO.
• Full ownership of the sales function.
• Clear mandate to build the team, process, and revenue engine.
• Competitive executive compensation.
• Performance-based variable compensation tied to ARR and bookings.
• Meaningful equity participation.
• Flexible, high-trust working model.
• International team with a clear mission and strong customer pull.
• Opportunity to help scale AVIAN to $10M+ ARR and beyond.

The AVIAN Way:

• Clarity, ownership, speed. Everyone owns outcomes end-to-end.
• Fail fast, fix faster. We learn quickly and improve continuously.
• Radical transparency. Shared knowledge, open decisions, constant feedback.
• Global and focused. International team, customer-obsessed, real-world impact.

AVIAN is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request.

About us

Early Fire Prevention. Predictive Power.

AVIAN’s Swiss-engineered computer vision algorithms provide mission-critical protection for high-risk industries - wood, recycling, paper, and beyond - by spotting process anomalies before they escalate. Our AI-driven system has already stopped thousands of fires and downtime hours in real operations, saving facilities from catastrophic loss.

With the world’s largest dataset of real fire events, AVIAN delivers unmatched accuracy, instant alerts (SMS, WhatsApp, phone), and PLC-based automatic shutdowns. Beyond fire safety, our predictive maintenance analytics extend equipment lifetime, reduce downtime, and keep your facility insurable.