Where Cherry's portfolio is competing hardest for talent

Engineering leads demand, but GTM is the surprise

Strip out operational and field roles and the portfolio's hiring splits into two big blocks: engineering and go-to-market. Backend and infrastructure engineering is the largest single technical function, but sales and GTM sit right behind it — 205 open roles — and that number is concentrated in a handful of scaling companies (Moss alone has 14). For a portfolio this weighted toward B2B software, that GTM bulge is the tell of companies moving from "does the product work" to "can we sell it repeatably."

~90 of the "backend/infra" roles are hardware/deep-tech engineering at firms like The Exploration Company, not software — real software-engineering demand is closer to ~185 roles, still the largest technical block. Roles classified by title from the portfolio board.

The map is German, and getting tighter in two cities

Germany accounts for the clear majority of European roles, with the UK, Netherlands and France forming a second tier. The heat is not evenly spread: Berlin and Munich together carry most of the engineering demand, which means the same companies are chasing the same backend, platform and AI engineers in the same two talent pools. When Tacto, Dash0-adjacent teams and a dozen Berlin fintechs all want a senior backend engineer at once, time-to-fill stretches — and the data shows it has.

Roles mentioning each geography; multi-location postings can appear in more than one row.

The roles that stay open are senior, and that's the real cost

Two-thirds of open roles have been live for more than 45 days, and the seniority mix explains why. Mid-senior and senior roles make up the bulk of demand (roughly 800 of 1,293), and those are exactly the hires a small in-house team struggles to close: passive candidates, longer processes, more competition. A director- or staff-level engineer left open for three months isn't just an empty seat — it's roadmap slippage and load piling onto the people already there. Across the portfolio, 873 roles carry that cost right now.

What this means for the talent team

Three things stand out for anyone supporting these founders. First, the pinch points are predictable: senior backend and infrastructure engineers in Berlin and Munich, AI engineers across the AI-native companies, and go-to-market hires for the fintechs moving into scale. Second, the companies feeling it most are Series A and B teams with real volume and little or no in-house recruiting — Tacto, Dash0, Moss and Light are the clearest cases. Third, the bottleneck is capacity, not candidates: the talent exists, but these teams don't have the hours to run 15 senior searches at once. That's the gap worth closing. TechTree screened 88,002 candidates in the first seven months of 2026 and qualified 9,767 — a live, vetted bench in precisely these functions.