[Hiring] Chief Commercial Officer @Maritime Ventures

Role Description

For an industrial or maritime SME, a machine is one of the largest commitments it will make — and it is usually decided without a dedicated procurement function, on offers that were never built to be compared. The supplier who is closest usually wins. 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.

Backed by Fincantieri, PSA Italy and CDP Venture Capital. Pre-seed closing. The commercial playbook does not exist yet; the role is to find it and then run it.

We are looking for a founder-level commercial leader, not a sales director. You own revenue, and you own the questions we have not answered yet.

The mechanism matters more than the pipeline. You form a hypothesis about how this industry actually buys, design the test with our product counterpart, run it against real accounts, read the answer honestly, and move. Expect to be wrong often and quickly.

You close personally, and you own the long-cycle institutional relationships that take twenty conversations to land. We sell through partnerships, associations and the supply chains of our backers rather than cold volume — but the number is yours, whichever route gets there.

Responsibilities

• Own the number: pipeline, conversion, subscription revenue and the forecast behind it.
• Form the commercial hypotheses — who buys, why, at what price — and design the tests that settle them.
• Close the first accounts personally, before there is a team to delegate to.
• Own the institutional and large-account relationships through long, multi-stakeholder cycles.
• Build the supplier side and the commission structure, keeping the criteria transparent and the recommendations neutral.
• Set pricing and packaging with product, and revise it when the market says otherwise.
• Hire and lead the commercial organisation, and set the bar for everyone who follows.

Qualifications

• A decade in B2B commercial roles, with real time inside industrial, construction, maritime or equipment sectors.
• Deals you closed yourself and can quantify — not a team's number you managed.
• Fluency in how an SME with no procurement office decides: who signs, who blocks, what actually moves them.
• A network of decision makers in Italian industry you can activate in the first month.
• Consultative selling on capital goods: total cost, financing structure, residual value — not price alone.
• The discipline to settle a commercial question with a test rather than an opinion, and to accept the result.
• Italian at native level; English at professional level.
• Based in Italy, with frequent time on client sites and at sector events.

Nice to Have

• Exposure to leasing, rental or asset finance.
• Experience selling subscription revenue alongside transactional deals.
• Experience opening a second market, not localising for one.
• Founder or first-commercial-hire experience, including one that did not work.

Benefits

• A category with no neutral player in it and no European equivalent. The ceiling is not an Italian one.
• Full ownership of revenue and of the commercial model itself, not a quota someone else set.
• A peer seat: you and the product lead decide what gets tested; the founder breaks ties, reluctantly.
• Competitive cash compensation with a performance-linked component, 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 product seat.
• Institutional backing at startup speed. Small team, short meetings, no theatre.
• If you have closed enough to know that the pipeline was never the hard part, and you want to build the commercial engine of a category rather than hit someone else’s quota, we should talk.

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.