A working draft of the first-phase team: the seats to fill, the order to fill them, indicative loaded compensation, and how the plan sits inside the $3M pre-seed. Every figure is a planning range, deliberately left with room to move.
Phase one is the 2026 development year: the goal is to ship the regulated tokenization rails, not to scale go-to-market. That argues for a small, senior team weighted toward engineering and compliance, with the rest of the company deliberately deferred to Series A. The roster below is the full phase-one team as currently planned — eight seats, one already filled.
This is a founder working draft, not a commitment. Seats, titles, and the figures throughout are indicative and sized to leave room to move as the right people are found and as the raise closes. Treat every number as a planning band, not a budget line.
| SEAT | MANDATE | STATUS | NOTE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chief Technology Officer | Architecture, eng leadership, hires and owns the build team | OPEN · W1 | First or co-first seat; equity-weighted |
| Chief Compliance Officer | Regulatory strategy, custody & reserve compliance, regulator relationships | OPEN · W1 | Full-time or fractional-to-start (see 3.0) |
| Security Lead / Sr. Security Engineer | Custody security, key management, threat model, audits | OPEN · W2 | Existential for a custody platform |
| Back-End Developer | Core ledger, settlement, APIs, integrations | OPEN · W2 | Hired by the CTO |
| Front-End Developer | Institutional UI, dashboards, onboarding flows | OPEN · W2 | Hired by the CTO |
| AI Lead | AI tooling and automation across the platform | IN SEAT | Already on the team |
| Fractional CFO | Financial control, model stewardship, raise support | OPEN · W3 | Fractional by design, not full-time |
| Product / Operations Generalist | Product coordination and operating leverage for the seniors | OPEN · W3 | The one flex seat; could be founder-covered |
The shape matters more than the count. Four of the eight seats are engineering (CTO, security, back-end, front-end, plus the AI lead already in seat), two are the financial-and-regulatory spine (CCO, fractional CFO), and one is a single operating generalist. There is intentionally no sales, marketing, or business-development headcount in phase one — the product is not yet shippable, and those functions belong to the Series A team.
In regulated tokenized rails, compliance requirements are engineering requirements. Custody tiers under CIRO's framework, privacy-by-design, and stablecoin reserve and segregation rules all shape the architecture from day one. That is why the CCO is a phase-one seat hired alongside the CTO, not an overhead role added later (see documents 02.3 and 02.4 for the regulatory backdrop).
The order of these hires matters as much as the list. The leadership and regulatory spine come first because they shape what gets built and define who else to bring in; the build pod follows under the CTO; the flex seats come last. Three waves, spread across the build year.
No full-time sales, marketing, BD, design, or QA in phase one. Those are real functions — they are simply Series A functions. Holding the line here is what keeps the build-year team small enough to fund from the pre-seed without compressing runway.
The figures below are planning bands, not offers. Each is a fully loaded annual cost — base plus roughly 20–25% for employer costs, benefits, and equipment — in Canadian dollars, and most packages are expected to be equity-weighted, which trades cash today for ownership. The point of the band is to keep room: hire toward the low end where equity does the work, the high end where the right person commands it.
| SEAT | LOADED ANNUAL (INDICATIVE) | BASIS |
|---|---|---|
| Chief Technology Officer | $200K – $260K | Equity-weighted |
| Chief Compliance Officer | $170K – $220K | FT; fractional ~$90–120K |
| Security Lead | $160K – $200K | Full-time |
| Back-End Developer | $130K – $170K | Full-time |
| Front-End Developer | $120K – $160K | Full-time |
| Fractional CFO | $60K – $110K | Fractional |
| Product / Ops Generalist | $110K – $150K | Flex / deferrable |
| New-seat run-rate (annualized) | ~$0.9M – $1.3M | 7 open seats |
| AI Lead (already in seat) | $150K – $190K | In place |
| Full-team run-rate (annualized) | ~$1.05M – $1.45M | 8 seats |
Two things keep this comfortably inside the $3M. First, the hires are staggered across the year, so the year-one cash outlay on people is well below the annualized run-rate — on a Wave 1–3 schedule, roughly $0.6M–$0.9M of actual phase-one salary cost rather than the full run-rate. Second, several packages are equity-weighted and two roles (CFO, generalist) are fractional or deferrable, which flexes cash down further if needed.
| PHASE-ONE USE OF THE $3M (PLANNING) | INDICATIVE |
|---|---|
| Team / salaries (staggered, year one) | $0.6M – $0.9M |
| Non-comp OpEx — legal, audit, infra, filings | $0.4M – $0.7M |
| Reserve / contingency | held back |
| Against the raise | $3.0M |
The 4orm Education revenue bridge (document 05.2) is what lets this team be carried through the build year without compressing runway or over-diluting: it earns from the same institutions during development, offsetting OpEx and extending the runway toward Series A. The hiring plan is sized to be fundable from the $3M on its own; the Education bridge is the cushion that turns a ~15–18 month runway into a more comfortable one.
Draft for planning. Seats, sequence, and all figures are indicative and subject to change as hiring proceeds and the raise closes. Not an offer of employment and not an offering document.
Prepared for approved data room members. This document does not constitute an offer to sell securities or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. 4orm Finance Holdings Inc. is the parent entity of 4orm OpCo, 4ormEx OpCo, and 4orm Trust Co; technology is developed by KCS Capital, an independent research and development firm.