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Choosing a seat

Fractional CTO or Fractional CFO?

Which seat your startup needs now, what each one owns, and what an engagement covers. Either is engageable on its own; taking both is an option rather than a condition.

Signs you need the Fractional CTO

  • You are making architecture decisions you have no way to evaluate
  • The roadmap slips and you cannot tell whether the estimate or the execution was wrong
  • You are about to hire engineers and have nobody to interview them
  • Technical due diligence is coming and nobody owns the answers
  • Your build is outsourced and you have no independent read on its quality
  • Infrastructure cost is climbing faster than usage

Signs you need the Fractional CFO

  • You cannot state your runway without rebuilding a spreadsheet first
  • An investor asked for a model and you are starting from a blank page
  • You price on instinct and margin is drifting
  • Month-end takes two weeks and the numbers still get argued about
  • A raise is six to nine months out and there is no data room
  • The board pack gets assembled the night before

Signs you need both

  • Your hiring plan and your engineering roadmap are two documents that disagree
  • You are raising on a technical story the financial model does not support
  • Build-versus-buy and runway keep arriving as the same question
  • You are at 0-to-1, where every technical decision has an immediate cash consequence

When neither seat is the answer

If technology is your moat, a novel algorithm or custom hardware needs someone in the building full time with their name on it. And if you need someone 40+ hours a week, you are describing a permanent hire, where paying fractional rates is the expensive route. We would rather say that on the first call than in the third month.

Fractional CTO

Led by Ankit Rana

Owns
The technical plan, and the team that has to deliver it.
Best for
Founders carrying technical risk they cannot evaluate on their own.
Explore Fractional CTO Services

Fractional CFO

Led by Michelle Rana FCCA

Owns
The financial plan, and the numbers an investor will test.
Best for
Founders whose next decision has a cash consequence they cannot model.
Explore Fractional CFO Services

What Each Seat Covers

Hands-on leadership from strategy through execution. These are the capabilities delivered inside each engagement, not separate retainers.

Technical Track — Fractional CTO

Technical

0-to-1 Product Builds

Launch your MVP in weeks, not months

Go from idea to production-ready product with a system built to scale. No rebuilding later, no technical debt from day one.

8-12 week delivery
Built to handle growth
Full ownership handover
Technical

Agentic AI Engineering

Get agents past the demo and into production

A knowledge layer over what your business already knows, and the platform that ships agents against it: shared scaffolding, evaluation, guardrails and observability.

Company brain over internal knowledge
Evaluation and guardrails before scale
Cost and latency under control
Technical

DevOps & Platform Engineering

Deploy daily with zero downtime

Automated infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and GitOps workflows. Ship confidently and iterate fast from day one.

Automated deployments
Infrastructure as code
Zero-downtime releases

Financial Track — Fractional CFO

Financial

Financial Modelling

Know your numbers before investors ask

3-statement models, unit economics, and scenario planning. Financial models that stand up to due diligence scrutiny.

3-statement models
Unit economics analysis
Scenario planning
Financial

Fundraising Support

Close your round with confidence

Pitch deck financial sections, data room preparation, and investor Q&A coaching. We've helped startups raise from pre-seed to Series A.

Data room ready
Financial due diligence prep
Valuation support
Financial

Financial Controls & Governance

Close the books faster, with numbers you can trust

Month-end close discipline, purchasing and payroll controls, and CapEx governance. The financial plumbing that stops surprises reaching your board.

Faster, cleaner month-end close
Audit-ready controls
CapEx and spend governance
Request a Strategy Call

Free 30 minutes. No sales pitch.