Riviera Partners Buys AI Recruiter Lateral Labs Amid Executive Talent War

Riviera Partners, a prominent executive search firm backed by Insight Partners, has acquired Lateral Labs, a specialized recruiting company for AI startups. The deal strengthens Riviera’s ability to find top-tier talent in artificial intelligence and machine learning, a market where demand far outstrips supply.

Riviera Partners has a track record of placing technology leaders at major companies like Uber, Snowflake, Figma, and Discord. By bringing Lateral Labs into its fold, the firm gains direct access to a client roster that includes high-growth AI companies such as Cursor, ElevenLabs, Runway, Scale AI, and Luma Labs. This move positions Riviera as a dominant player in the fiercely competitive AI talent market.

Lateral Labs was founded in 2024 by Rob Infantino, a former recruiter at OpenAI and Amazon Web Services. The firm focuses on embedded, retained, and contingent search for machine learning and AI research roles. Infantino built the company to help AI startups hire “from its first technical hire through IPO,” a niche that has become increasingly valuable as the industry races for specialized talent.

The acquisition is part of a broader consolidation strategy for Riviera, which previously acquired Build Talent, Board and Technology, and Arete Partners. This pattern reflects a shift in the executive search industry, where firms are expanding their capabilities to serve venture-backed and private equity-backed companies more effectively.

Kyle Langworthy, a Riviera executive, noted that “as few as two percent of companies are organizationally ready to execute with AI.” While that figure is lower than some industry estimates, which place full AI readiness at roughly one-third of organizations, the gap remains stark. ManpowerGroup’s 2026 data shows that 72 percent of employers globally struggle to fill open roles, with AI and machine learning among the hardest-hit categories.

The urgency of this talent war is evident in the numbers. Meta reportedly spent $1.5 billion on a single engineer from Thinking Machines Lab, and OpenAI has acknowledged offering signing bonuses of up to $100 million. For recruiting firms, the message is clear: companies need better pipelines to find the people who command these astronomical sums.

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

The acquisition also puts Riviera in closer competition with a new wave of AI-native recruiting startups. Dex, a London-based AI talent agent that counts ElevenLabs among its clients, raised a $5 million seed round in April. Dex uses conversational AI to build detailed candidate profiles, offering a different approach to traditional search methods.

Riviera is betting that its established model still works, provided 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 the most competitive hires are happening.

Whether established search firms or AI-native tools will win the AI talent market is an open question. What is not in dispute is the scale of demand. Second Talent’s 2026 analysis estimates roughly 1.6 million open AI positions globally against only 518,000 qualified candidates. 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 strategic bet that the firms placing AI leaders will themselves need to specialize, consolidate, and move at the same speed as the companies they serve.