Fractional CTO Services
Engineering rigour and technical leadership for ambitious startups. Make confident architecture decisions, put agentic AI into production, build the right team, and become investor-ready.
Retained monthly engagements, scoped to your stage · typically 60-80% less than a full-time CTO
Who you would be working with
Ankit Rana
Fractional CTO
Fifteen years building and scaling technology platforms: consumer-scale Java at Rated People and Rightmove, then leading engineering at Rungway, then regulated delivery through Codenest since 2017 across government, banking, pharma and payments. He has sat on the receiving end of technical due diligence, which is the fastest way to learn what it actually tests.
- Leads the Regeno engagement, a current Codenest client: a company brain over their own records, and an AI factory that drives a ticket to a merged pull request unattended
- Led engineering teams from 5 to 50+ across fintech and healthtech
- Ran a near seven-year platform transformation at Opayo by Elavon: AWS EKS migration, GitOps, a payments monolith moved to microservices
- Delivered under regulatory scrutiny for the Ministry of Justice, Tesco Bank, HSBC and AstraZeneca
- Rebuilt Rungway as its lead engineer, taking the platform from 5 to 1,000+ concurrent users with a zero-downtime migration
Rungway: 5 → 1,000+ concurrent users
Why Choose a Fractional CTO?
Strategic technical leadership tailored to your startup's stage and budget
Save 60-80% vs Full-Time
Get executive-level technical guidance at a fraction of the cost of a full-time CTO hire.
Investor-Ready Architecture
Build systems that pass technical due diligence and give investors confidence in your technology.
Scale Your Team Confidently
Get help hiring, structuring, and leading your engineering team as you grow.
Ship Faster, Break Less
Implement GitOps, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code from day one for rapid, reliable delivery.
What We Do
What the seat covers: strategy, architecture, the team, and the delivery of both.
Ideal For
- 1
Pre-seed to Series A startups
Need technical leadership before you can justify a full-time hire
- 2
Non-technical founders
Need a technical partner to translate vision into architecture
- 3
Teams preparing for due diligence
Need to get investor-ready quickly with proper documentation
In demand right now
Agentic AI Engineering
Most companies have AI pilots. Far fewer have anything underneath them: no shared knowledge layer, no evaluation, no way to ship the second agent faster than the first. That gap is the work.
See the Regeno engagementThe company brain
One queryable layer over your own documents, records and process, exposed to agents over MCP, so that people and agents answer from what the business already knows rather than from whatever fits in a prompt.
The AI factory
The platform underneath agent delivery: typed workflow graphs, an isolated sandbox per run, bounded test and review loops, merge gates you control, and a ledger of every decision. It is what stops the tenth agent costing what the first one did.
Evaluation and learning
An agent with no evaluation harness is a demo. Measurement goes in before volume does, and what each run learns is captured and recalled into the next, so the system gets cheaper as it runs rather than dearer.
Cost and latency discipline
Model choice, routing, caching and context hygiene. Inference bills scale with usage, and left alone they scale faster than the usage does.
Common Questions
Do you build agentic AI, or only advise on it?
Build. Regeno is a current Codenest client, and the engagement is a company brain and an AI factory: a queryable layer over their own records, and a delivery platform that takes a ticket from Linear, GitHub or Slack and drives it to a merged pull request unattended. The person advising on the architecture is the person writing it.
Everyone is telling us to build AI agents. How do you decide whether we should?
By asking what breaks if you do nothing. Agents earn their place on work that is repetitive, judgement-light, and already written down somewhere. Where the process itself is undefined, an agent automates the confusion faster. We will tell you when that is what we see.
What's the difference between a fractional CTO and a consultant?
A consultant hands you a recommendation and leaves. A fractional CTO is in your standups and your Slack, owns the technical outcome, and is still there when the decision has to survive contact with production.
How many hours per week do you typically work?
Engagements typically range from 8-20 hours per week, depending on your stage and needs. We can flex up during critical periods like fundraising or major launches.
When should a startup hire a fractional CTO?
Ideal timing is when you need technical leadership for strategic decisions but aren't ready for a £150-200k+ full-time hire. This is typically pre-seed through Series A stage.
Can you help us hire a full-time CTO eventually?
Yes. Part of our role is building the foundation for your permanent leadership. We help define the role, source candidates, and ensure a smooth transition when you're ready.
Do you work with non-technical founders?
Yes, and it is a large part of the job. The work is translation as much as architecture: what a decision costs, what it forecloses, and what you are actually buying when an engineer recommends something. You should never have to take a technical answer on trust.
What's your tech stack expertise?
We specialise in cloud-native architectures (AWS, GCP), Kubernetes, Terraform, Python, Java, Postgres/MySQL, GitOps, and agentic AI stacks: LLM orchestration, retrieval, evaluation and guardrails. But our real value is in architectural thinking — we choose the right tools for your specific needs.
What makes you different from a dev shop?
Dev shops execute your specifications. We provide strategic leadership first, helping you figure out what to build, how to fund it, and how to set up your team for long-term success.
Do you offer ongoing support after delivery?
Yes. A build usually steps down into a lighter retainer once it is live: scaling questions, hiring, and the architecture decisions that only surface under real load. The step down is planned, not improvised at the end.
Still researching? Read The Complete Guide to Fractional CTO Services or compare fractional vs full-time and fractional vs agency.
Ready to Level Up Your Technical Leadership?
Request a free 30-minute call. No sales pitch, and we'll say so if a fractional CTO isn't what you need.
Request a Strategy Call