Fractional CTO

When companies come to us

You're a non-technical founder with a development team (internal or outsourced) and you need someone who can evaluate their work, set technical direction, and translate between engineering reality and business goals. You've been burned by not having this role before, or your investors are asking for it.

You're a technical founder who's been acting as CTO while also running the company. The dual role was manageable at 5 people — at 15, it's not. You need someone to own the technical strategy, hiring process, and engineering culture while you focus on the business.

You're preparing for a funding round and need to get your technical house in order — architecture documentation, security practices, development processes — so that technical due diligence doesn't derail the raise.

Engagement model

Fractional CTO engagements are structured as monthly retainers with a minimum 3-month commitment. This isn't consulting — it's leadership, and leadership requires continuity.

• Standard engagement (2–3 days/week): covers technical strategy, architecture review, team management, hiring, and investor-facing technical communications. Most common for Series A companies with 5–20 engineers
• Intensive engagement (4–5 days/week): full CTO coverage for critical periods — fundraising preparation, major product launches, or crisis recovery. Typically 3–6 months
• Advisory engagement (2–4 days/month): lightweight oversight for companies that have a strong tech lead but need senior architectural guidance and a sounding board. Best for post-Series A companies with a maturing internal team

What a fractional CTO does

• Technical strategy: technology selection, build-vs-buy decisions, architecture roadmap aligned to business milestones
• Team building: hiring process design, technical interview frameworks, compensation benchmarking, onboarding programs
• Process: sprint structure, code review practices, deployment pipeline, incident response, post-mortems
• Investor readiness: technical due diligence preparation, architecture documentation, security audit readiness, data room technical materials
• Vendor management: evaluating and managing relationships with outsourced development partners, infrastructure providers, and SaaS vendors
• Board and investor communication: translating technical progress and risks into language that resonates with non-technical stakeholders

What you get

• Technical strategy document aligned to your 12–18 month business plan
• Engineering team assessment with growth plan
• Architecture decision records for all major technical choices
• Hiring pipeline and interview process (if applicable)
• Monthly executive briefing on technical health, velocity, and risk
• Smooth transition plan when you're ready to hire a full-time CTO

Sample engagement

A late-seed B2B fleet management startup with $4M in funding had a 6-person development team split between a US-based product manager and offshore engineers. Feature velocity was declining, two senior developers were considering leaving, and the Series A investor meetings were 4 months away.

We embedded a fractional CTO 3 days per week for 8 months. In that period, we restructured the development process (reducing cycle time by 45%), hired 3 senior engineers, led an architecture migration from a monolithic Rails app to a service-oriented Node.js backend, and prepared the technical due diligence materials that contributed to a successful $12M Series A close. The platform grew to serve 600,000+ fleet customers during the engagement.