Head of Business Development
About Seabound
Seabound is an award-winning startup decarbonizing global shipping by capturing CO₂ emissions directly onboard ships. To date, we’ve completed two world-first pilots; raised >$10M in equity and grant funding from top investors including Lowercarbon Capital, Collaborative Fund, Y Combinator, and Eastern Pacific Shipping; and partnered with leading shipping and industrial players. Having recently completed our first full-scale commercial systems, Seabound is now entering its commercialization and scale-up phase.
The Role
We are seeking a Head of Business Development to lead and grow Seabound’s commercial function. Reporting directly to the CEO, you will own customer and key partner relationships; drive near-term commercial execution; and help build the foundations of Seabound’s long-term sales, business development, and partnerships capabilities.
This role will start highly hands-on and execution-focused, with scope to define longer-term strategy and take on broader commercial leadership responsibilities as the company scales.
What You’ll Do
Short-term (0–9 months): execution & deal ownership
Seabound is an award-winning startup decarbonizing global shipping by capturing CO₂ emissions directly onboard ships. To date, we’ve completed two world-first pilots; raised >$10M in equity and grant funding from top investors including Lowercarbon Capital, Collaborative Fund, Y Combinator, and Eastern Pacific Shipping; and partnered with leading shipping and industrial players. Having recently completed our first full-scale commercial systems, Seabound is now entering its commercialization and scale-up phase.
The Role
We are seeking a Head of Business Development to lead and grow Seabound’s commercial function. Reporting directly to the CEO, you will own customer and key partner relationships; drive near-term commercial execution; and help build the foundations of Seabound’s long-term sales, business development, and partnerships capabilities.
This role will start highly hands-on and execution-focused, with scope to define longer-term strategy and take on broader commercial leadership responsibilities as the company scales.
What You’ll Do
Short-term (0–9 months): execution & deal ownership
- Own Seabound’s commercial relationships across priority customers, ports, and strategic stakeholders
- Secure short-term commercial deals for demonstrations and early deployments
- Build the foundation for longer-term commercial agreements for broader fleet deployments, including long-term service agreements, with the aim of securing one or more of these in the short term
- Where knowledge gaps exist, develop and maintain a deep understanding of the global shipping landscape, including key players, decision-makers, ownership structures, and strategic priorities, to inform customer targeting and engagement
- Identify which customer segments, profiles, and use cases represent the strongest near-term and long-term fit for Seabound
- Own pricing strategy and early unit economics across products and services, balancing commercial viability with deployment realities
- Build and grow the customer pipeline and progress opportunities through it, with accountability for converting traction into contracted revenue
- Work closely with customers to revise and refine Seabound’s product, business model, and commercial structures based on real-world needs and feedback
- Develop a deep understanding of Seabound’s customer business cases, including regulatory drivers, cost structures, and economic trade-offs, and communicate these clearly and credibly to customers
- Help prioritise customers, deployments, and commercial opportunities in line with company capacity and strategy
- Track the competitive landscape and ensure Seabound’s offering remains differentiated as the market evolves
- Identify and pursue opportunities to strengthen Seabound’s brand, credibility, and perception within the shipping industry
- Represent Seabound externally in customer meetings, industry events, conferences, and partner discussions
- Identify opportunities to reduce commercial or delivery costs through deal structure, partnerships, or customer insight
- Continue progressing and converting commercial pipeline into contracted deployments
- Secure longer-term commercial agreements, including multi-year service agreements and fleet expansion opportunities
- Develop repeatable sales processes, frameworks, commercial reporting, and playbooks based on early learnings
- Build out the commercial team and supporting processes as required to support growth
- Work with external stakeholders — including partners, advisors, ports, and other ecosystem players — to originate and progress opportunities
- Support commercial inputs into fundraising, grants, and project-finance discussions
- Support regulatory engagement and advocacy efforts where required to unlock or accelerate commercial adoption
- Ensure early commercial contracts are executed successfully, working closely with Seabound’s engineering and operations teams and feeding delivery learnings back into product and commercial strategy
- Ensure commercial contracts are robust, scalable, and aligned with Seabound’s risk and delivery framework
- Expand and lead Seabound’s commercial team across sales, business development, and partnerships
- Drive realised revenue growth from early commercial traction to tens, and ultimately hundreds, of millions in annual recurring revenue (ARR)
- Contribute to shaping Seabound’s commercial strategy as regulation, markets, and customer needs evolve
- Serve as a core member of the leadership team as Seabound continues to scale
- 10+ years of experience in commercial, business development, or sales roles
- Comfortable operating in complex, B2B, long-sales-cycle environments (industrial, energy, infrastructure, maritime, climate tech, or similar)
- Demonstrated history of originating, negotiating, and closing material commercial agreements
- Confident engaging with senior stakeholders, including shipowners, C-suite executives, technical teams, and regulators
- Sufficient technical acumen to engage credibly with Seabound’s engineering team and technical stakeholders at shipping companies
- Comfortable working with financial models and regulatory frameworks, and willing to get into the weeds to understand and communicate the customer business case
- Clear and persuasive communicator, able to explain complex ideas in writing, verbally, and through well-structured customer-facing materials and presentations
- Strong sense of accountability and end-to-end responsibility
- Comfortable with ambiguity and building things from scratch
- Proactive, creative, and resourceful, with a willingness to think outside the box
- Curious about climate, regulation, and how markets evolve, particularly where such changes affect commercial outcomes
- Bias to action, experimentation, and learning by doing
- Strong listener and quick learner, with the ability to synthesise new information and translate it into commercial action
- Experience in shipping, energy, heavy industry, or infrastructure
- Experience selling or commercializing a novel product, technology, or business model
- Exposure to partnerships, joint ventures, or project-based commercial deals
- Experience scaling a commercial function at a startup or high-growth company
- Familiarity with regulatory-driven markets
- Existing network across the shipping industry
- Help materially reduce emissions from the global shipping industry — one of the world’s hardest-to-abate sectors
- Build a brand new category of technology for the shipping industry and commercialize a world-first climate technology
- Join a tiny commercial team, with significant scope to shape how Seabound’s entire commercial function is built and operates
- Take on outsized scope and responsibility as one of Seabound’s earliest and most critical commercial hires
- Work closely with a strong, highly technical team, translating advanced engineering into real-world deployments and revenue
- Play a central role in taking Seabound from first commercial deployments to scaled adoption across the global shipping industry
- Competitive salary and meaningful equity