Commercial Lead (Operations & Finance)

As Commercial Lead, you will sit at the core of Sealeo’s transition from material innovation to industrial scale. Your role is to map costs, understand operational realities, and turn fragmented technical, market, and customer data into a coherent economic picture.

You will work directly with the founders to research markets, analyse cost drivers, build financial and operational models, and surface the assumptions that truly matter. Your work will shape how Sealeo allocates capital, communicates progress to investors and partners, and plans its path to industrial scale. This is a hands-on role for someone who enjoys working close to the ground, asking hard questions, and replacing guesswork with evidence.

You will help create the foundation on which the strategy is built: rigorous analysis, clear numbers, and operational insight. Your output will directly influence funding decisions, scale-up pathways, and the commercial viability of first-of-its-kind biomaterials entering real-world markets.

This is a front-facing role within a growing deep-tech ecosystem. You will have opportunities to represent Sealeo at industry events, conferences, and innovation forums, contributing to how the company is positioned as it scales.

This role is for someone who wants ownership, responsibility, and early impact, joining Sealeo at a pivotal stage as the company transitions to scale. You will see a direct line between your work and tangible outcomes: materials scaling into production, legacy plastics and expanded polystyrene being displaced, and measurable environmental impact being realised. Your work will help determine how a new class of sustainable, high-performance materials reaches the market and begins to change how critical supply chains operate.

Responsibilities

• Lead research and analysis across markets, operations, and cost structures, providing evidence-based inputs to inform strategic decisions.
• Build and maintain financial models and projections covering capital expenditure, operating costs, revenues, and funding requirements through Series A/B.
• Analyse unit economics, cost drivers, and scalability, linking material choices, process assumptions, and operational pathways to financial outcomes.
• Identify key financial assumptions and uncertainties that affect margins, scalability, or funding needs, and highlight areas requiring further validation.
• Define, track, and report use of funds for current and future financing rounds, with clear separation between R&D and commercial expenditure.
• Support development of go-to-market and production pathways, including supplier, manufacturing, and partner considerations as the business scales.
• Conduct ongoing market, competitor, and regulatory research, focusing on cost, sustainability impact, and technical performance benchmarks.
• Translate customer validation activities (interviews, pilots, LOIs, contracts) into structured commercial and operational insights.
• Build and manage internal operational and project-management structures, coordinating timelines, deliverables, and cross-functional inputs.
• Maintain cap table and financing scenarios, and prepare clear, data-driven materials for investors, stakeholders, and major grant applications.

Qualifications

Must-haves:

• 2–4+ years experience in operations, finance, or analytical roles within technology companies.
• Demonstrable experience supporting fundraising (VC, angels, grants or strategic investors)
• Strong quantitative skills, with experience building and maintaining financial models and forward-looking projections.
• Strong communication and presentation skills: you can turn complex ideas into clearly structured materials
• Solid organisational and project-management capability (COO-style mindset)
• Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-moving environments, where priorities evolve and structure is built iteratively
• High level of ownership and accountability, with the ability to work autonomously while collaborating closely with a technical founding team and learning complex material systems quickly

Nice-to-have:

• Experience in deep-tech, climate tech, pharma, or packaging industry
• Experience working with or alongside materials science, manufacturing and R&D teams
• Familiarity with regulated markets (pharma, medical devices, food, chemicals)
• Background in science and/or engineering
• Experience with Innovate UK or similar grant funding bodies