Build at the intersection of AI and human(ity).
People are already bringing the hardest questions of their lives to a machine. We are putting a coach behind those conversations, so the answer comes from someone who has sat with a human being and stayed.
Nearly a billion people a week talk to a machine. A lot of it is their real life.
Hundreds of millions of those conversations every week are about a life, not a task. The decision that will not settle. The thing they cannot say at home. There is no coach in any of them, and the thing answering is built to keep them coming back.
Coaching is one of the few practices that holds wisdom, presence and the willingness to stay with another person. Today it reaches the few who can find it and afford it, and it stops when the budget stops. Both of those are solvable, and AI in the hands of a great coach is what solves them.
We think everyone deserves a coach. And that AI, in the hands of a great coach, is how we finally get there.
Our north starWhat we set out to master.
Four areas between here and a coach for everyone. Come master them with us.
From a coach community to a movement.
Coaches do not just use this, they shape it and own part of it: 70+ interviews in, equity set aside, co-creation in the open every month. No software company in our field has ever been carried by its own users like that. Turning a community into a movement, with research as its spine, is a distribution problem nobody has a playbook for. You would be writing it.
Reaching the people already asking a machine.
One coach holds one practice. This category has to hold hundreds of thousands, with a human in the loop on every one and a conversation as dependable at midnight as it is in session. Making coach-supervised AI personal, safe and reliable at that scale is a craft of its own, and it is how the mission stops being a manifesto and becomes infrastructure.
Decoding what makes a great coach.
Even the best coaches cannot fully explain how they do what they do. The craft is tacit: decades of listening, which question to ask, when to hold the silence. We decode it, coach by coach, until a coach’s AI is recognisably theirs, and independent researchers judge the fidelity rather than us. The feedback loop is live: masters of the craft, correcting the work every week.
Two together, worth more than either alone.
An hour with a great coach can change your week. Then the week happens: the insight fades, the old pattern wins, and the coach is not there to see it. Their AI is. Reflections, exercises, challenges and checks, in the coach’s own approach, with the coach reading every word. Nobody has shown that coach and AI together beat either alone. We get to design it, prove it, and be first.
How we operate.
Two co-founders, AI agents doing real work every day, and senior coaches in the build every week.
Two co-founders
Louise and Nick, with over thirty years between us in AI and digital transformation. Whoever joins works next to one of us, with nobody in between.
Evidence, not claims
Coaches pay for CoachNova today, and more arrive every week. What we claim, we set out to prove: independent researchers are setting up studies of this work, and we actively contribute to the global AI work of the EMCC, the second-largest coaching federation in the world. Build here and the feedback on what you make runs to PhD level.
Work where you live
We work from Portugal, Germany, Greece and the US, together in person every quarter. Across time zones this runs on self-reliance with exceptional communication and transparency, and on output at the speed an ambitious early stage demands. Ownership holds it together: you run your scope end to end.
Ownership is shared
Two per cent of the company is already set aside for the coaches shaping it. Everyone who joins gets a generous stock option plan of their own. The people who build this hold a piece of it.
Where you come in.
If the intersection of AI and humanity is where you want to work, these are the roles we actively see now, and more are close behind. Your role not here yet? If the mission has you, we would love to hear from you anyway.
Commercial partner
Two founders. One builds the product. One built the category, the coach community and the market we now grow into. Between them sits everything that makes a business compound: revenue, the funnel, partnerships that run without a founder in the room, customer success as a system. That is a whole job, and it is the most senior one we will add. Call it COO or Chief Business Officer; the mandate matters more than the title.
- You own the revenue number, and the cash behind it, from the first paying coach to the priced round and beyond
- You have run growth and operations from first revenue through a seed to Series B journey, in B2B SaaS or a marketplace, with a small team and real numbers
- You build the machine and then run it: conversion, activation, expansion, and a weekly operating rhythm the whole company can read
- You open partnership doors alongside the founders, and you make what is behind every door run and compound
- You hire and lead the commercial team that comes after you, and it is better because you chose it
- AI-native in how you operate, and you have a genuine feel for the coaching profession. A credential is not required
A partner, not a first employee, with the ownership to match.
AI engineer, evals and fidelity
The gap between how a coach would answer and how their AI answers is the whole product, and it has never been measured properly in coaching. You build the measurement, and you build the loop that makes it compound: every coach correction becomes training signal, every graded session makes the next one more faithful. What it produces goes in front of independent researchers rather than into a claim we make about ourselves.
- You have built evals in production at a senior level, not in notebooks: dataset curation, rubric design, LLM-as-judge pipelines, human labelling, and regression tests that catch a quiet degradation before a coach does
- Retrieval and memory architecture. How one client’s AI carries a year of context without drifting from the coach it belongs to
- You turn coach corrections into measurable improvement, and you know the difference between a model that got better and a benchmark that got easier
- You have clear opinions about where a model should not be used
- You can hear the real problem underneath the one a coach describes, and disagree with two founders well
Second person on the model, next to the founder who built it.
Product lead
Coaching has always been the most human conversation there is. Your question: what does that conversation become in an AI-first product, across app, desktop and voice? The answer has not been drawn yet, and you get rare freedom to create it. A lead role from day one, owning the product and how it gets built, with room to grow into our Chief Product Officer across product and technology.
- You own the user experience end to end: research with coaches and clients, flows, interface, and the words that carry them, across app, desktop and voice
- You own how we build: the roadmap, the weekly plan, what ships this sprint and why, and a delivery rhythm the whole company can read
- Customer research and validation are yours: you run the interviews, test with coaches before we build, and kill ideas the evidence does not support
- You have designed AI-first products where the interaction is a conversation rather than a form, and you have run delivery with engineers, not just handed them designs
- You know enough psychology to design for how people actually think, not how a spec says they do
- You prototype fast and in the open, with something coaches can react to every week
Three senior product advisors to think with: Nirish Shakya, Thomas Marzano and Eric Vallone.
Working students
We have built with working students in our previous startups and it is one of the things we would repeat without thinking about it. They read the world differently from us, and they get things done. Three months at least, two days a week at least, and a scope that is genuinely yours rather than whatever is in front of us that week. Community, marketing, operations, or tech and AI.
- Doing a master’s or the equivalent, though we care far less about the credential than about what you have actually made
- More doer than thinker. Both, ideally, in that order
- AI-first in how you work, not in how you talk about it
- Punching above your weight already, with an opinion you will defend
- Pitch us something: what you are building, what you cannot stop reading about, what you built that nobody asked you for
We give you the space. You own the scope and make it happen, with a founder next to you and advisors most people meet ten years into a career.
Other roles we see adding to the team by Q1 2027.
Customer success engineer. You get every coach to the moment CoachNova changes how they practise, inside their first two weeks. You are technical enough that the answer is right the first time, and everything you hear on those calls feeds straight into the product. The part to love: your users are world-class coaches, and they coach you right back.
Go-to-market engineer. You build the system that lets coaches find us, understand us and start without a human touching it. Hundreds of thousands of coaches would recognise themselves in this and have never heard of us; closing that gap with AI doing the real work, enrichment to attribution, is the build of a career.
Full-stack AI-first developer. You build across the whole product, interface to model, with AI agents beside you all day. What you make lands in front of working coaches the same week, and their reaction lands back with you just as fast.
Community lead. You give the coach community a home of its own: the monthly calls, coaches bringing coaches, co-creation in the open. It is already the growth engine; you are the person who makes it a movement.
Come and build with us.
Everyone deserves a coach. Join us on the mission.
More room than anywhere bigger will give you.
You build for leaders.
And you reach them through their coaches, people whose working life is in service of others. The coaches are generous with their time and thoughtful about what you make.
Opened at eleven at night.
What you build gets opened by someone carrying the thing they cannot say at home or at work, not by a dashboard. Your work lands in a real life, at the moment it matters most.
Co-create the company.
We know exactly what we are building; how your part gets built is yours to own. Co-creating the company is not a perk here, it is the expectation. And you do it on work that genuinely matters.