Riviera Partners, an executive search firm backed by Insight Partners, has acquired Lateral Labs, a recruiting firm specializing in hiring for artificial intelligence startups. The acquisition marks a strategic move to strengthen Riviera's capabilities in identifying and placing machine learning and AI research talent, a domain where demand far outstrips supply.
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 services for AI and machine learning roles, focusing on understanding the technical profiles that AI companies require. Its client roster includes prominent AI startups such as Cursor, ElevenLabs, Runway, Scale AI, and Luma Labs, placing it at the center of the most competitive hiring battles in the tech industry.
Background of the Deal
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The deal brings Lateral Labs' client relationships and specialized expertise under the umbrella of one of the largest technology-focused search firms in the industry. Riviera Partners, founded in 2002, has completed thousands of leadership placements over more than two decades and 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, noted in the announcement that as few as two percent of companies are organizationally ready to execute with AI. This figure is notably lower than other industry estimates, which place full AI readiness at roughly one-third of organizations, according to surveys from workforce firms tracking the AI hiring landscape. ManpowerGroup's 2026 data found that 72 percent of employers globally are struggling to fill open roles, with AI and machine learning among the hardest-hit categories.
Rob Infantino and Lateral Labs' Founding
Rob Infantino's background as a recruiter at OpenAI and AWS gave him unique insights into the needs of AI companies. He built Lateral Labs to support AI startups from their first technical hire through IPO. The firm's approach combines deep domain knowledge with a network of contacts in the AI research community. Infantino understood that hiring for AI roles requires not just finding candidates, but assessing their technical expertise—a skill set that generalist recruiters often lack.
The timing of Lateral Labs' founding coincided with an explosion in AI investment. Companies like Cursor, the AI coding tool, were in talks to raise two billion dollars at a valuation exceeding 50 billion dollars earlier this year. ElevenLabs raised 500 million dollars at an 11 billion dollar valuation in February. These companies are fighting hardest for AI researchers, and Lateral Labs has been placing candidates inside them.
The AI Talent Market Landscape
The acquisition reflects how the AI talent war has escalated beyond individual hires into an infrastructure-level competition. Meta reportedly spent one and a half billion dollars on a single engineer from Thinking Machines Lab. OpenAI acknowledged offering signing bonuses of up to 100 million dollars. These eye-catching figures underscore what recruiting firms already know: companies writing the checks need better pipelines for finding the people who cash them.
Riviera's own research supports this assessment. 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 report also highlighted that over 90 percent of global enterprises are projected to face critical skills shortages by the end of the year.
According to Second Talent's 2026 analysis, there are roughly 1,600,000 open AI positions globally against only 518,000 qualified candidates. This massive imbalance gives recruiters enormous leverage—and enormous pressure to find the right candidates quickly.
Competition and Strategic Implications
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. This approach threatens to disrupt traditional executive search models.
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. The deal also brings in expertise in retained and contingent search for AI research roles, complementing Riviera's existing services.
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. The war for AI talent shows no signs of abating, and specialized recruiters like Lateral Labs have become critical partners for startups that need to scale their technical teams rapidly.
For Riviera Partners, 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. With the global AI hiring landscape evolving so quickly, this acquisition positions Riviera to capture a larger share of the executive search market in one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy.
Rob Infantino's move from OpenAI recruiter to founder of a specialized AI recruiting firm, and now part of a larger search powerhouse, mirrors the trajectory of the industry itself: from niche to mainstream, from individual efforts to institutional scale. The acquisition not only expands Riviera's capabilities but also signals that the talent war in AI is reshaping the recruiting industry itself.