Startup Account Executive

About the role

We are seeking a Startup Account Executive to bring safe, frontier AI to India's thriving startup ecosystem from our Bengaluru hub. You will partner with some of India's most innovative startups—from fintech unicorns to emerging SaaS pioneers—helping founders, CTOs, and engineering leaders leverage Claude to transform their businesses. Combining consultative selling with deep technical fluency, you'll own the full sales journey from first outreach through production deployment, while developing market insight into the unique requirements of building in India for both domestic and global markets. Working closely with our global GTM, product, and marketing teams, you'll shape how Anthropic serves the rapidly evolving needs of Indian startups while upholding our commitment to AI safety and reliability.

Key responsibilities

• Build relationships with key stakeholders across India's startup ecosystem, from seed-stage founders to scale-up leadership teams
• Own the complete sales cycle from initial outreach through implementation, navigating technical decision-makers including CTOs, engineering leads, and product heads, and ensuring successful adoption of Claude across diverse use cases
• Guide startups from proof-of-concept through paid pilot to production scaling, helping them navigate consumption-based pricing and cost optimisation
• Collaborate with ecosystem partners including accelerators, VCs, and developer communities to expand Anthropic's presence in India
• Develop market insights specific to Indian startups—including cost optimisation, scale, multilingual and vernacular language needs, and data residency—and advocate for features that serve Indian developers
• Gather and document use cases from sectors such as fintech, edtech, healthtech, and agritech to inform the global product roadmap
• Develop playbooks tailored to the Indian startup sales cycle, accounting for budget cycles, procurement processes, and the balance of technical and business stakeholders
• Contribute to building a world-class sales organisation in India by mentoring and collaborating with team members and establishing processes that scale

Minimum qualifications

• 8+ years of B2B sales experience in the Indian startup ecosystem, preferably selling developer tools, APIs, or SaaS products
• Track record of success in consultative selling to technical audiences, with demonstrated ability to exceed targets
• Deep understanding of India's startup landscape, including key players, investors, and market dynamics
• Technical fluency to engage credibly with engineering teams on topics such as API integration, LLM fundamentals (context windows, prompt engineering, fine-tuning), common use cases (RAG, semantic search, conversational AI), security and compliance (data privacy, SOC2/ISO), and cost optimisation (caching, batch processing); you don't need to code, but you should confidently translate between business value and technical requirements
• Experience with consumption-based pricing models and guiding startups from POC to production
• Understanding of Indian startup buying dynamics, including budget cycles, procurement processes, and common data residency and compliance concerns
• Strong relationship-building and communication skills, with the ability to navigate from technical teams to C-suite executives
• Entrepreneurial mindset with the abili