Unlock your startup's potential with us

An easy way to hire top talent

Get matched with world-class talent

Our talents are suited with a university degree from Europe’s best universities and experience from fast-paced environments. They can hit the ground running and start contributing to your product already during the first months.

Easy process with no commitments

Leave the most time-consuming tasks to us. We help you form the job description, source the talents and pre-vet the best ones. We charge a flat finder’s fee only after you make a hire.

Full support with relocation

We handle your new employee’s flights and J-1 visa together with our travel partner and SF-based lawyer. Our community in the US will help your new employee with everyday practicalities, making the relocation more seamless and fun.

We help startups and talents of the future to grow

Our story started in Finland in 2011 by a group of students from Aalto University’s entrepreneurial community. They wanted to change the negative attitude towards entrepreneurship and make it more accessible to emerging talent.

With this mission in mind, we’ve sent over 250 ambitious students and graduates to fast-growing startups in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn from the world’s largest tech ecosystem. The goal is to help them find the confidence to create world-changing innovations themselves. And that’s why we do it not-for-profit.

What our partners say

“Startuplifers has been an amazing program in helping us find great talent in a remote working world!”

Han Wang, Co-founder
Paladin Cyber
San Francisco, CA

“When I first discovered Startuplifers, I thought it was too good to be true. The entire process has been straight-forward and efficient and the quality of candidates is very high."

"We care about quality, and with Startuplifers we’re able to get people who write higher quality code than the fresh graduates coming from the top universities here in California.”

“Their whole process was great! We had a 20-minute call to talk about our talent needs, and Startuplifers presented us the perfect candidate that they had hand-picked based on our chat."

"We’ve hosted two excellent interns in the past two years, and both have had a great impact on our company from day one. Startuplifers makes the whole process pain-free, which is a breath of fresh air after dealing with the visa issues.”

“I hope no other companies find out about this amazing program.”

Bring talents who deliver to your team

I worked at Petasense as a Business Development Manager. I managed our sales throughout the whole funnel and built it through emailing, calling, online webinars, face-to-face product presentations to potential customers. My tasks also included negotiating deals with customers and attending relevant conferences to build market and competitor knowledge. One of my favorite tasks was collaborating with product development and the engineering team on customer requests.

I worked at Coinbase as a Product Designer. Coinbase is a Y Combinator company that builds a platform for transacting digital currencies. At Coinbase I did UX design and web design for Coinbase’s consumer product and marketing website. I also spearheaded Coinbase’s user research initiative by organizing and conducting user testing for their web and mobile products. I ended up working for the company for almost two years. The learnings have had a massive impact on my career.

My first project at Notable Labs was to build a new backend service for storing data produced in our drug research. In parallel with this project, I also did both back- and frontend work on the internal web-based tools used by the scientists. Towards the end of my internship, I started researching machine learning models to automate a crucial bottleneck in the data analysis process, which was made possible by the data infrastructure I had already built.

Being a member of Metabase’s hyper-technical team was a fascinating experience. I deeply enjoyed the level of autonomy and social support I received during my internship. I worked on almost all aspects of our frontend and got my hands dirty with the Clojure backend as well! My proudest achievement was coming up with a novel way to do frontend testing which had a huge positive impact on the stability and reliability of our product.

I worked at Upbeat PR as a software engineer. Because of our small team, I had a large number of various tasks from machine learning to UX designing. However, my main tasks were under data science-oriented backend development. I improved data scraping from the web, implemented various backend interfaces, and created a logic to match journalists for the clients’ needs. I was surprised how free I was to select the next thing to work with.

I worked on the customer facing web application, and because of our small team, I had a major ownership on it. Basically, all OneSignal dashboard feature requests and bugfixes were assigned to me. It was thrilling to continuously ship code to over 110,000 clients as feedback quickly found its way back to me.

Miika Jokinen

Business Development Manager, Petasense

Satu Peltola

Product Designer, Coinbase

Oskari Mantere

Software Engineer, Notable Labs

Atte Keinänen

Software Developer, Metabase

Joel Huttunen

Software Engineer, Upbeat PR

Juuso Haavisto

Software Engineer, OneSignal

A hassle-free process

Let's discuss your needs

Book a call with us to discuss the requirements for the positions you’d like to fill.

We find and shortlist the right people

You’ll receive a pre-vetted list of up to 5 most suitable candidates for each position.

You interview the talents, we do the rest

After hiring we step in again to arrange and pay for the visas and flights together with our US-based lawyer and travel partner.

FAQ

We are a not-for-profit organization, and we simply want to give the best possible experience for young Nordic talents working at Silicon Valley’s best startups. Similarily we offer startups great engineer, designer or business talents for a price that doesn’t break the bank.

We take a flat finder’s fee per each hire starting from $6k, depending on the seniority of the position. The Finder’s Fee covers everything; the visa, flights, basic health insurance for the candidate and our operational costs. The Finder’s Fee is only charged when you end up hiring a candidate introduced by us.

We have candidates for the very core roles needed in a young, growing company: engineers to build the product, designers to make everything look pretty and intuitive, and business people to market and sell the whole thing.

Most of our talents are about to graduate or have graduated with their Master’s from a Finnish or Swedish university. On top of this, they have an average of 2 years of working experience from their field.

You’ll negotiate the salary with the candidate. Usually, our engineer talents with some years of working experience are paid $5000 or above per month. However, we do recommend adjusting the salary level based on the candidate’s experience and the seniority of the role.

We use a J-1 visa for interns and trainees and our global visa partner and California-based lawyer will guide you through the whole visa process. The whole process is very light and takes approximately 2 months.

We work with CIEE, one of the biggest sponsoring organizations in the US. Kilroy is an international travel agency coordinating the visa process between the candidate and CIEE, and we even have a US-based lawyer making sure that the visa application will get approved.

The easiest way is booking a 15-minute intro call with Lorenzo here to discuss your needs and the next steps. You can also contact him at lorenzo@startuplifers.org. We look forward to hearing from you!

Interested? Great, let’s do this!

Book an intro call with our startups team. During the call, we’ll explore your talent needs and company in more detail to get a better understanding of the candidates you’re after. You can also get started by shooting us a message at lorenzo@startuplifers.org.