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21 hires in 18 months - scaling five functions at once.
How we scaled Kato’s team across four functions in 12 months — from first BDR to senior engineering.
21 hires
15 hires in 2025
From first BDR
18-month
THE STORY
Kato hit that moment every fast-growing startup dreads: every team needed people all at once. Sales needed to grow. So did Customer Success and Engineering. They didn't have the in-house TA capacity to keep up, and the business was moving too fast to hire one role at a time.
This is where most companies bring in an agency for each function. Which also means different standards, different timelines and different ideas of what good looks like. The team ends up fragmented before it’s even built.
WHAT WE BUILT
We ran Kato’s entire talent strategy as one joined-up effort, with the same process and the same bar for every role.
We covered five functions: Sales, Engineering, Customer Success, Marketing and Finance.
Every hire came through the same sourcing pipelines and was assessed against the same standard. Each one also understood how their role fitted with the others. That added up to 15 hires in 2025 and 6 more in the first half of 2026.
THE result
Kato scaled from early-stage to a team with depth across every function, all built at the same pace and to the same standard. Instead of five separate hiring stories that never quite connected, they had one team ready to grow together.
Whenever I see a photo of our team, I’m forever grateful for having Andrew Richardson and his Foundation team helping to build such an incredible group.