Operations and Finance Lead

Safari AI, formerly known as curbFlow, uses computer vision technology to convert the digital cameras of businesses & organizations into data collection machines. There are over a Billion IP cameras in the world, and Safari AI’s mission is to make them much more valuable to their commercial owners. Clients connect their video to Safari AI to get real-time, business-critical data like pedestrian counts for retail, guest tracing for commercial real estate, traffic counts for DOTs and engineering firms, employee engagement at restaurants, and live wait times for amusement park rides, to name a few of our use cases.

Paying clients include Taco Bell/Yum Brands, NYC’s largest 7-11 franchisee, Goodwill, Brightline, Merlin Entertainments (owner of Legoland) and JBG Smith, developer of Amazon’s HQ2.

Safari AI was seed-funded with $8mm in 2018 by venture capital firms General Catalyst and Initialized Capital (Garry Tan) and expects to raise a Series A by the summer 2024.

Leadership & Culture:

Safari AI is founded by a former Y Combinator founder with a meaningful exit under his belt. The company has headquarters in NYC, and a distributed engineering team with members living throughout North and South America.

About You And How You Succeed At Safari AI:

You’re excited about building a product that hasn’t been built before. You have a bias toward action when you are stuck but are not afraid to ask for help when you need to. You’re eager to test new ways of doing things and can take advantage of the freedom an early stage startup can afford you. You are eager to engage not only with the business side of the team, but with the clients and users themselves.

About The Role:

We have an exciting opportunity for a hands-on operations and finance pro to work directly with Safari AI’s Head of Operations & Finance and the rest of the leadership team. This is an essential role for the company and one where you’ll be able to drive mission-critical day-to-day business operations and support on the company’s most pressing strategic initiatives to help scale the business.

The CEO and Head of Operations & Finance are based in New York City. This role would be expected to work from the Safari AI’s midtown Manhattan office at least 4x/week.

What You Will Be Working On Weekly Basis:

• Lead and support essential business operations functions, including but not limited to Finance, Vendor Management, People Ops, and Client Activation functions
• Set the company up for scale as it approaches a multi-million dollar ARR level
• Help manage the company model and budget
• Assist in the Sales finance/Ops function of a growing Enterprise customer base
• Contribute to Technical Operations, specifically working with the company’s partners to label and QA client data
• Lead the response to RFIs and RFPs where the company believes it has a high chance of winning
• Help manage key vendor relationships and search for redundancies and savings opportunities as we outgrow existing vendors
• Assist in future fundraising efforts

Requirement for the Role:

• Undergraduate degree from a top 30 university
• 3+ years of experience in Finance, Management Consulting, or similar Operations / Finance / Strategy leadership position at a early- or mid-stage startup, preferably in Enterprise SaaS
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Detail-oriented with strong organizational and administrative skills
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
• Bias for action with strong ability to multitask
• Available to travel on an occasional but not frequent basis

Why bet on Computer Vision and Safari AI?

• Huge industry hiding in plain sight: auto-measuring physical activity at scale
• Large chasm between customer knowledge and market availability, i.e. customers don’t know what is available in the market
• No clear leader; everyone is small and unbranded (i.e. no Amazon or Google in the room to compete with)
• The tech is very modular, allowing Safari AI and its customers to invent whole new use cases on a regular basis
• Safari AI has developed the tech and data pipelines over three years and invested several million dollars and is now ready to scale
• Safari AI is already emerging as the market leader in auto-measuring with CV by working with customers like Merlin Entertainments, Taco Bell/Yum!, Goodwill, JBG Smith, City of Washington DC and Brightline to name a few.