[Hiring] Chief Product Officer @Maritime Ventures

Role Description

For an industrial or maritime SME, a machine is one of the largest commitments it will make. Those decisions get taken without a dedicated procurement function, against suppliers who know the market far better than the buyer, and on offers that were never built to be compared. Equiply was created to change this.

We are building the intelligence layer for industrial equipment: what to acquire, how to acquire it, and a verified record of every machine a company owns. We start in Italy, in the maritime and port supply chain. We are not building an Italian company — this is a global category, and we intend to prove it early.

This is a founder-level seat, not a functional one. The contribution we need is the standard the company builds to, and the speed at which it scales.

• Building the product is the cheap part.
• What is scarce is knowing which standards hold at a hundred times the volume.
• Building a company where AI runs the process rather than decorates it — internally, not only in what we ship.
• You own the asset intelligence layer: contracts, certificates and inspection records turned into a machine record that holds up under scrutiny.
• You also own how the company itself is built.

Responsibilities

• Set the standards — data model, architecture, quality bar — and defend them when speed argues otherwise.
• Own the machine record end to end, and its reliability as volume grows by orders of magnitude.
• Design how the company runs on AI: what is agent-run by default, what stays human.
• Decide build, buy or partner; move development in-house and hire the team.
• Convert open questions into tests that run in days, not quarters.
• Push across the company — pricing, hiring, positioning, the round.
• Build the product and engineering organisation, and set the bar for everyone who follows.

Qualifications

• A decade building software products, including one you took from nothing to real scale.
• A standard you set that held as the thing grew — and one you got wrong.
• AI inside your working process, not your pitch: work you rebuilt around models, where it broke, what your team stopped doing.
• Technical depth to decide architecture yourself; range to hold your own on pricing, hiring and go-to-market.
• A habit of settling disagreements with tests rather than opinions.
• Global ambition, and impatience with single-market thinking.
• English at professional level. Italian is an advantage, not a gate.
• Remote-first, with regular time in Genoa and Milan and time on client sites.

Nice to Have

• Founder or first-employee experience, including one that did not work.
• Asset-heavy, document-heavy or regulated B2B: leasing, insurance, logistics, industrial.
• A product taken into a second market, not localised for one.
• Real curiosity about machines and the people who run them.

Benefits

• A category with no neutral player in it and no European equivalent. The ceiling is not an Italian one.
• A founder-level seat with unshared authority over standards and architecture.
• A peer seat: you and the commercial lead decide what gets tested; the founder breaks ties, reluctantly.
• Competitive cash compensation, set at the close of the pre-seed.
• Substantial early co-founder equity, with conversion to the co-founder title at a six-month review — on terms identical to the commercial seat.
• Institutional backing at startup speed. Small team, remote-first, no theatre.

Company Description

Maritime Ventures is a venture builder supported by CDP Venture Capital, together with leading industrial, financial, and innovation players from Italy and Germany. Our mission is to launch 10 high-impact startups to drive the digital and sustainable transformation of the maritime industry.

• Backed by key partners like Fincantieri, PSA Italy and Intesa Sanpaolo, among others.
• We provide a unique ecosystem where experienced founders, technologists, and operators collaborate to turn bold ideas into scalable companies.