Fractional AI CTO for Growth-Stage Companies

You need senior AI leadership but cannot justify a £250k+ full-time hire. Your engineering team is capable but has never shipped production AI at scale. Your investors are asking questions about AI strategy that your current leadership cannot confidently answer.

This is the fractional AI CTO gap, and we fill it.

What a Fractional AI CTO Does

Architecture Decision Authority — We make the hard calls on model selection, infrastructure design, and build-vs-buy that your team is debating internally. These decisions compound. Getting them wrong at Series A creates technical debt that costs 10x to fix at Series B.

Team Structure and Hiring — We design your AI team structure and help you hire. Most startups either hire too many ML researchers (who cannot ship) or too many software engineers (who cannot model). We build balanced teams that deliver.

Vendor and Tool Evaluation — The AI tooling landscape changes monthly. We evaluate LLM providers, vector databases, orchestration frameworks, and monitoring tools against your specific requirements — not against a generic blog post.

Investor-Facing Technical Leadership — When your lead investor asks "what is your AI moat?" we provide the answer. We join board calls, write technical sections of investment memos, and ensure your AI narrative is credible and defensible.

How the Engagement Works

We embed with your team for a minimum of 3 months. We attend your standups, review your PRs, sit in your architecture discussions, and make decisions alongside your existing leadership. This is not advisory from a distance — it is hands-on technical leadership.

After the initial sprint, most clients transition to a retained advisory model where we provide ongoing guidance on architecture evolution, hiring, and strategic decisions.