Bridge engagement
Fractional CTO for Series A Startups
Series A companies hire me for one of two reasons: the codebase that got them to product-market fit will not get them through the next 18 months, or their technical leader has left and the search for a replacement will take six months.
Both are bridge engagements with a defined end. My job includes making myself unnecessary, usually by hiring the person who replaces me.
What I'm hired to own
The decisions that are cheap now and expensive later
Tech debt treated as a single undifferentiated problem
It is not. Some debt is fine forever, some is actively costing you velocity, and some is a single point of failure away from an outage. I triage it into those three buckets with real cost estimates so you can decide rather than guess.
Hiring without levels, bands, or an interview loop
Post-Series A you are hiring fast, and without a defined bar you will hire inconsistently and pay inconsistently for it. I build the levelling framework, the interview loop, and the scorecards, then run them until your team can.
Reliability that was acceptable at 50 customers is not at 500
On-call rotation, alerting that means something, incident review, error budgets. Unglamorous, and the difference between growing and firefighting.
Security posture behind where your customers now are
Post-A you are selling to bigger companies who audit you. Access management, secrets handling, vendor review, SOC 2. I bring this up to the standard your new pipeline expects.
No plan for the permanent CTO hire
The point of a bridge is that it ends. I define the role, source and assess candidates, and hand over cleanly, including the written architecture and decision record they will need on day one.
How an engagement runs
Week one, month one, month three
Week 1
I find out what is actually true
Architecture review, codebase read, and honest conversations with every engineer you have. You get a written assessment at the end of it: what is solid, what is risky, what is going to break, and what it costs to fix each one. No slide deck, just a document you can act on.
Month 1
The bleeding stops and the roadmap becomes real
I fix or contain the things from week one that were actually urgent, and rebuild the technical roadmap so it has dates you can believe. If you are hiring, the role is written and the interview loop exists. If you are pre-launch, scope gets cut, usually by a lot.
Month 3
It runs without me in the room
Ship cadence is predictable, the team knows the standard, security and infrastructure are at the level your customers expect, and the decisions are documented. If the engagement is a bridge to a full-time CTO, this is where I start hiring my replacement.
Why me, for this specifically
Experience, not a capabilities deck
Plenty of people can advise on series a. Fewer have shipped in it, been wrong in it, and had to fix it with their own name on the commit. Here's what I'm bringing.
- 10+ years and six ventures, so I have been on both sides of this handover
- Engineering team building is a named service, not an afterthought
- M.Tech Cybersecurity, so the security uplift is core expertise, not outsourced
- Comfortable in the board and investor conversation as well as the codebase
Pricing
Priced at $100 an hour. Not counted at it.
I value my time at $100 an hour and the retainers are sized from that, but the hours are a floor I commit to rather than a cap I bill against. If a week needs more, it gets more. A full-time CTO in the US runs about $260,000 a year before equity; I'll do that job for $60,000 at 150% commitment. Three-month minimum, then month to month.
It does not all have to be cash. The split is negotiable, from a small equity component up to roughly half and half, depending on your stage and how long we expect to work together.
Technical Advisor
$1,500
per month
Minimum 15+ hours a month
A senior technical brain on call. For founders who mostly need the big decisions checked rather than someone in the codebase.
Fractional CTO
$5,000
per month
Minimum 50+ hours a month
Around 50 hours a month as your acting CTO, usually two days a week. I own technical direction, and the roadmap ships because someone senior is accountable for it.
Embedded CTO
$8,000
per month
Minimum 80+ hours a month
Around 80 hours a month, usually three days a week, hands on the keyboard. Everything above, plus I build the hard parts myself instead of delegating them.
Questions
Series A, specifically
How long does a bridge engagement usually run?
Three to nine months, depending on how fast the permanent hire lands. I would rather scope it honestly up front than have it drift indefinitely.
Will you help hire your own replacement?
Yes, and I think it is the most valuable part of the engagement. I write the role, assess candidates technically, and hand over with real documentation.
Can you do technical due diligence for our Series B?
Yes, and the better version is to start well before the raise so there is time to fix what diligence would otherwise surface.
More general questions about cost, commitment, and how this compares to a full-time CTO are answered on the main fractional CTO page.
Earned, Not Claimed
What the founders and teams I build with say
I had the pleasure of working with Kunal while building out my MVP and I have to say that it was pleasure to both interact and work with him and his team. As a first time founder, I had a lot of self doubt and internal ruptures, however Kunal's calm, never-say-die and never-panic attitude often helped bring me back to center. I can't vouch for him enough.
Anand Tahiliani
Founder, Debaser Technologies
I had the pleasure of working closely with Kunal during my time as a Product Manager at DhunGuru. As our CTO, Kunal and his team at Panicle Tech worked closely with me across the entire product journey, from building and launching our mobile apps to developing and maintaining our web platforms. His technical expertise, ownership, and willingness to collaborate made a real difference, and I genuinely enjoyed working with him throughout the journey.
Anirudh Joshi
Product Manager, DhunGuru
Kunal helped us architect Mosler's core platform, connecting smart lock hardware, our cloud dashboard, and PMS integrations into one reliable system. The foundation he helped design in those early days still scales with us today.
Pranav Kapoor
Co-Founder, Mosler
Building in series a? Let's talk.
Thirty minutes. Tell me what you're building and where it's stuck, and I'll give you a straight answer on whether I can help.
Book a 30-min callSend me a message