Founder-in-Residence, AI Ventures

LG NOVA, LG Electronics North America Innovation Center
You are not applying for a job. You are here to found LG's next company.
LG NOVA builds new ventures and spins them out as real businesses. We are looking for a small group of founders to validate and launch the next one, with LG's balance sheet, distribution, and government relationships behind them.

We are currently recruiting for our next Founder in Residence cohort, with the first 90-day validation sprint targeted to begin on October 12, 2026.
This is a founding seat, not an advisory one. If the venture proves out, you lead it as Founder and CEO.
The mandate is open on purpose.  We are not handing you a problem to solve. The strongest ventures come from founders who already see something the market has missed, so we are domain agnostic by design. While we are domain agnostic, we are focused on AI-enabled software ventures with strong commercial potential

We are looking for candidates with deep, hands-on experience building at the core AI layer, rather than primarily developing applications that consume third-party AI models. Ideal candidates have directly worked on the underlying AI lifecycle, including model training or fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, inference, optimization, and production-scale operation.

Relevant experience may include model training infrastructure, inference and serving, model optimization, AI runtimes, agent infrastructure, orchestration, evaluation, observability, governance, data infrastructure, or AI-native developer platforms. Candidates should understand model and data pipelines, compute and performance trade-offs, production reliability, and the economics of operating AI systems at scale.
Strong preference will be given to candidates who have built reusable AI infrastructure, platforms, or developer tooling that can support multiple applications or enterprise customers, and who can translate deep technical capabilities into a differentiated, commercially viable B2B venture

Bring the problem you have unfair insight into, the buyers you already know, and the conviction that it should exist as a company. Every venture in this cohort is AI-native.

.Please note: This is not an accelerator program. We are looking for candidates who want to build and validate a new venture from the ground up. If you already have an existing company or product that you are looking to advance through the program, this opportunity is not the right fit.

Who we are looking for
You are a domain operator with deep access to the buyers in your space. You have built or commercialized something real and have experience raising funding rounds. People in your industry take your call. Maybe you founded before, maybe you raised before, maybe you ran a business line that behaved like a startup. You move fast when the path is unclear, and you close.

 The profile we want
 Founder, repeat founder, or founding executive experience
 Deep expertise and credibility in a specific industry or problem space
 A live network of buyers and decision makers in your domain that you can leverage.
 A track record of building, commercializing, or scaling something new
 Comfort in ambiguity with a bias toward evidence and revenue
 A clear view on why AI makes your venture buildable now and not three years ago 
 
What LG NOVA offers
 You get resources most early founders would fight for.
 A concept testing budget so you can put real money behind proving demand
 A de-risking idea to commercialization budget up to 500K, setting you up for Seed round.
 Government partnerships in multiple U.S. States that open real doors to pilots, design partners, and first customers
 An LG backed fund that gives validated ventures a direct path to capital, so you are not starting your raise from zero
 Market research, market sizing, and financial modeling done alongside you, not billed back to you
 Engineering services to help you test and build
 A competitive stipend at market rates while you do the work
 Equity in the venture you just validated and commercialized if it progresses to the Seed round

 You validate. We resource it.

How the program runs
 The program runs in two sprints.

- Sprint 1 is 90 days of validation. You define a specific high value problem, identify the economic buyer, test willingness to pay, and generate hard evidence that a venture should exist. The point is proof, not a product.
- Sprint 2 is 180+ days of building toward venture formation. You move from evidence to commercialization, early customers, and the foundation of a company. If the venture earns it, you become Founder and CEO of a new business built with LG behind you.

What you will do
 Develop and sharpen a venture thesis 
 Run buyer discovery with the people who actually hold the budget
 Pin down the economic buyer, the budget owner, and how they buy
 Validate the pain, the workflow, and the real size of the demand
 Design and test a paid pilot, a design partner program, or an early offering
 Secure concrete evidence of willingness to pay, whether a paid pilot, a signed letter of intent with commercial terms, or a design partner agreement, from a named buyer
 Build the commercialization plan and the business model
 Bring back a recommendation grounded in what the market told you
 What success looks like by the end
 A clearly defined venture opportunity
 A validated customer and economic buyer
 Hard evidence of demand
 A credible path to revenue
 Signed design partners, pilots, or customer commitments
 A commercialization plan that scales
 Enough conviction that LG should invest and build
 
The Details
 This is a contract, hybrid role based in Santa Clara, California.

 The Founder in Residence program is designed as two consecutive 90-day sprints. Compensation is annualized and paid during each sprint as follows:
 - Sprint 1 (90 days): Annualized compensation equivalent of $180,000–$200,000, plus a dedicated concept testing budget.
 - Sprint 2 (180+ days): Annualized compensation equivalent of $200,000–$240,000, contingent upon successful completion of Sprint 1 and selection to continue into the commercialization phase.
 
We are selecting a very small, highly selective founding cohort for this round, so the bar is high and the opportunity is significant. The Founder-in-Residence engagement is structured as a paid contract role during the venture validation and development phase.
If your venture is successfully spun out and you transition into the role of Founder & CEO, your executive compensation package—including salary, equity, and other compensation elements—will be negotiated separately as part of the new company's formation and financing.
 
NOTE: We are building software solutions only, so no hardware and nothing capital intensive upfront. Every venture in this cohort is AI-native. The industry is yours to pick. For this cohort we are not considering health or clean tech (other verticals at LG NOVA), so if that is your space, this is not the cohort for it.

HOW TO APPLY
Include the following with your application:

- Your resume
- A short founder summary, about one page, answering the three questions below in a few sentences each:

1) What experience have you had building? Pick one venture, product, or business you personally helped build or commercialize. What was the problem, what did you own, and what were the measurable results such as revenue, customers, funding, or adoption?

2) What traction did you have? Tell us about a time you found a real customer need, proved demand, and won early customers. What did you do, and what happened?

3) How do you move? Give us one example of using your network to accelerate something, a key hire, a partnership, a customer relationship, or an industry connection that changed the outcome.

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