A senior engineering team for your startup. Paid in equity.

You have the idea and the domain. You want senior engineers now, before revenue, and you want to keep most of your company. Cirup puts a senior team inside your startup for a transparent equity stake of 5–20%, builds with you until you are ready to hire your own, and stays on as an advisor.

Apply or ask a question How it works

What you get

Senior people, inside your company

Embedded in your team

SRE, DevOps, backend, fullstack, AI/ML and security engineers, plus a commercial partner for go-to-market. They work in your repo, your plan, your targets and your architecture decisions, from the first week.

A fraction of a co-founder's equity

Your stake follows the hours, skills and duration you need and the stage you are at, typically between 5 and 20%. You see the whole calculation before you decide, and nothing vests until the work is delivered.

A 30-day sprint first

We start the real work with vesting paused. After 30 days both sides confirm and vesting backdates to day one. Everything built in the sprint is yours, whatever you decide; if you go another way, the month is settled on terms you chose at signing, out of your future success rather than your cash.

A defined end

We agree upfront what "ready to hire your own engineers" means for you. When you get there, we step back to a light advisory role. Your codebase is built for handover from day one.

Infrastructure included

Git, CI/CD, GitOps, observability, security scanning, secrets and IoT device management: Swiss-hosted, open source, running from week one, included.

Selected on conviction

We take on 3–5 startups a year. Three questions decide: do we believe in the idea, in the founders, and are we excited to build it together? When both of us answer yes to all three, it's a go.

	Technical co-founder	Cirup
Equity	20–50% for one person	5–20% for a whole senior team
Time to start	Months of searching	Weeks: intake, scoping, sprint
Commitment	Permanent	Defined off-ramp, you keep everything built
Afterwards	One person's bandwidth	Advisory partner for the long run

How it works

Five steps, three to four weeks

ApplyA short written application. How you think about your problem and what you need. A page is enough.
TalkNinety minutes with both co-founders. A peer conversation between people who build things.
ScopeA working session with the engineers who would join you: what gets built, by whom, and what your hiring milestone looks like. Sales plan included.
DecideA written proposal with the full equity calculation. Five working days to review it with your own counsel.
SprintThirty days of real work, vesting paused. Then both sides confirm, and vesting starts.

Who we work with

Real engineering depth, full-time founders

Distributed systems, AI in production, hardware and IoT, infrastructure at scale. Founders who are full-time on the company, own their IP, plan to hire their own technical team within six to eighteen months, and want engineers who have seen the problem before and say what they think.

If that sounds like you, the first conversation is ninety minutes away.