Most early-stage startups don't need a full-time CTO salary — they need someone who's made the architecture, hiring, and vendor calls before and can make them fast. A fractional CTO gives you that judgment on a schedule that matches your stage, not a six-figure fixed cost you grow into later.
We review pull requests, sign off on architecture, and make the calls a technical co-founder would make — not just deliver a slide deck.
We've screened and structured enough engineering hires to spot a bad fit before the trial period, not after.
Build vs. buy, which cloud, which framework — decided from having shipped and maintained the alternatives, not from a blog post.
Engagement hours shrink as your in-house team and full-time CTO hire take over, not a contract you're stuck renewing.
Roadmap sequencing, build-vs-buy calls, and architecture decisions tied to your funding stage.
Job specs, technical screens, and structured interviews so you hire the right first engineers.
Sanity-checking your stack and infrastructure before technical debt becomes a fundraising risk.
Evaluating platforms, APIs, and infrastructure providers against your actual constraints.
Explaining technical risk and roadmap in terms a non-technical board can act on.
A fractional CTO is an experienced technical leader who works part-time across strategy, architecture, and hiring. Startups typically need one once technical decisions have real consequences — raising a round, hiring the first engineers, or scaling past an MVP — but before they can justify a full-time executive salary.
An advisor gives opinions in occasional meetings. A fractional CTO is embedded enough to review code, sit in on hiring, and make binding technical decisions — closer to a part-time executive than a consultant.
It varies by stage and need, from a few hours a week for periodic architecture review to several days a week during a hiring push or major technical decision. We scope hours to what the stage actually requires.
Yes. We prepare technical documentation, answer investor technical questions, and can join due diligence calls to speak credibly to architecture and team plans.
Tell us about your stage and technical bottlenecks — we'll scope the fractional CTO engagement that fits.