Riviera Partners, the Insight Partners-backed executive search firm that has placed technology leaders at companies including Uber, Snowflake, Figma, and Discord, is acquiring Lateral Labs, a recruiting firm that specialises in hiring for AI startups. The deal brings Lateral Labs' client roster, which includes Cursor, ElevenLabs, Runway, Scale AI, and Luma Labs, under the umbrella of one of the largest tech-focused search firms in the industry.

Lateral Labs was founded in 2024 by Rob Infantino, who previously worked as a recruiter at OpenAI and Amazon Web Services. The firm offers embedded, retained, and contingent search for machine learning and AI research roles, positioning itself as a specialist that understands the technical profiles AI companies need. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The acquisition is part of a broader pattern in executive search. Riviera, which was founded in 2002 and has completed thousands of leadership placements over more than two decades, has been on an acquisition streak. The firm previously acquired Build Talent, Board and Technology, and Arete Partners to expand its capabilities across venture-backed and private equity-backed companies.

Kyle Langworthy, a Riviera executive, said in the announcement that “as few as two percent of companies are organizationally ready to execute with AI.” That figure is lower than other industry estimates, which put full AI readiness at roughly one-third of organisations, according to surveys from workforce firms tracking the AI hiring landscape. ManpowerGroup's 2026 data found 72 percent of employers globally are struggling to fill open roles, with AI and machine learning among the hardest-hit categories.

Infantino said Lateral Labs was built to support AI companies with hiring “from its first technical hire through IPO.” The firm's client list underscores how concentrated the AI talent market has become.

Cursor, the AI coding tool, was in talks to raise two billion dollars at a valuation above 50 billion dollars earlier this year, and ElevenLabs raised 500 million dollars at an 11 billion dollar valuation in February. These are the companies fighting hardest for AI researchers, and Lateral Labs has been placing candidates inside them.

The deal reflects how the AI talent war has escalated beyond individual hires into an infrastructure-level competition. When Meta spent a reported one and a half billion dollars on a single engineer from Thinking Machines Lab, and OpenAI acknowledged offering signing bonuses of up to 100 million dollars, the message to recruiting firms was clear: the companies writing the cheques need better pipelines for finding the people who cash them.

Riviera's own research supports this. Its AI Hiring Blueprint 2026 report, based on hundreds of executive searches, found that companies want AI leaders who can work across product, finance, and operations while communicating with boards and building teams that last. The supply of candidates with that combination remains thin.

The acquisition also puts Riviera in closer competition with a new class of AI-native recruiting startups. Dex, a London-based AI talent agent that counts ElevenLabs among its clients, raised a five million dollar seed round in April and uses conversational AI to build detailed candidate profiles rather than traditional search methods.

Riviera is betting that the old model still works if it moves faster. The firm uses a proprietary platform with machine learning to score and predict candidate fit, but its core business remains relationship-driven executive search. Adding Lateral Labs gives it a direct line into the AI startup ecosystem where many of the most competitive hires are happening.

Whether established search firms or AI-native recruiting tools win the AI talent market is an open question. What is not in dispute is the scale of demand, with roughly 1,600,000 open AI positions globally against only 518,000 qualified candidates, according to Second Talent's 2026 analysis.

Over 90 percent of global enterprises are projected to face critical skills shortages by the end of the year. For Riviera, the Lateral Labs acquisition is a bet that the firms placing AI leaders will themselves need to specialise, consolidate, and move at the same speed as the companies they serve.