MK
Taking new engagements

You're accountable for the build. Nobody's shown you their working. I will.

A written verdict in five days, a finished build in twelve weeks, or the certificate a contract is waiting on — from a hands-on fractional CTO who writes the code, and who can stay on afterwards.

Ten years from pre-seed to national-scale platforms, on both sides of the Atlantic — embedded as a senior technical voice, not a deck of strategy slides.

  • Product · Engineering · Delivery
  • Pre-seed → Series A
  • Remote-first · UK & US clients
Mayur Kale — Fractional CTO
Code
Product
AI
Fundraising
DevOps
Data
Security
Hiring
10+
Years building and leading engineering teams
1–2 days
A week embedded in your team — not an advisory retainer
0 → 1
Prototype to production, more than once
7 sectors
AI, manufacturing, fintech, government, space and more — the failure patterns repeat.
The problem

Everyone who can tell you the truth about your build is selling you something.

Most founders don't need a full-time CTO yet. They're making CTO-level decisions every week regardless.

A date you were given, and a decision you have to sign off before it

Someone else set the date. Someone else wrote the quote, the contract, or the status update. You are the one who signs, and nobody independent has read it — so the first honest signal usually arrives after the money is spent.

A demo that has to become a product before the round

It works in the room and falls over everywhere else. What closed the meeting now has to survive real customers, real data, and an investor who will look under it.

A contract waiting on a certificate

Procurement has sent the security questionnaire, or the tender makes Cyber Essentials a condition of bidding. The deal does not move until someone hands over a certificate — not a readiness report.

Mayur Kale standing at the board with an engineering team at the morning standup
In the room

I run your engineering team, not a slide deck about it.

I join the standup, own the roadmap, sit in the sprint reviews and write code in the same repo as everyone else. Your engineers get a technical leader who can answer the hard question in the moment — and your investors get someone who can defend the architecture in a diligence call.

That means the team keeps shipping while the strategy gets fixed, rather than pausing for a three-month consulting exercise that ends in a document nobody implements.

How it works

A four-step engagement — designed to de-risk every week.

Mayur Kale sketching a 90-day engagement plan on a whiteboard
01
Discovery

30-minute call. We scope the problem, stage, and fit. No pitch — just an honest read on whether I can help. Getting it checked before you sign is the cheapest thing you will do all quarter.

02
The written verdict, or the plan

A fixed fee and a fixed window — five days against the date you booked it for, or up to three weeks depending on the door you came in. It ends in a document, and the document is yours to take anywhere, including to someone else.

03
The engagement

The seat, the build, or the certification — whichever the document argued for. Always in your own cloud accounts, your own repos, under your own domain.

04
Who owns it next

Every engagement ends with a named owner on your side and the handover done in writing. If that owner is a hire rather than me, the report says so.

Old Street's Silicon Roundabout at dusk — the London tech cluster where I'm based
Where I work

Remote-first for UK and US teams — in the room when it matters.

Day-to-day the work runs over Slack, a shared repo, and a standing call — the same way your engineers already work. My afternoons cover the East Coast working day and I stay online into the West Coast morning, so US founders get real overlap rather than a once-a-day handover.

I'm based in central London, so board meetings, architecture workshops, and hiring loops can happen in person across the city and the rest of the UK — and I travel for the moments in a US engagement that genuinely need a room.

What clients say

In their words.

I had a founder-built prototype, a pre-seed conversation weeks away, and nobody technical who could answer for either of them. Mayur told me straight what my architecture could and couldn't carry, and why — then took it to production, hired our three founding engineers and sat on the investor calls as the technical counterparty. We rebranded mid-raise and closed the round.
Founder & CEO
Everwise — AI eSourcing for UK public-sector procurement
Read the engagement it came from
For larger companies

Not a startup? I'm the specialist for the hard problem.

Larger companies and Fortune 500 enterprises bring me in on a specific, high-stakes problem — an explainable supply-chain optimisation engine for a global manufacturer, a 10-language corporate platform for a public company. Deep in software engineering, data engineering, and AI/ML — hands-on, and accountable for shipping the thing that actually works.

Software engineering
Data engineering
AI/ML engineering
Free guide

The questions to ask before you sign.

Twelve questions to put to an agency, a supplier or your own team before you commit money to a build — and, for each one, what a real answer sounds like next to an answer that is avoiding you. Written for the person who signs it off and can't personally check it.

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A build you can't evaluate, a demo that has to ship, or a certificate a contract is waiting on.

Book a 30-minute discovery call. If we're not a fit, I'll tell you on the call — and point you toward someone who is.

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