A B2B payments startup had a fragile monolith, a departed CTO, and a Series A pitch meeting in 12 weeks.
A Sydney B2B payments startup came to us in crisis. Their CTO had resigned, the platform had suffered three outages that month, and a Tier 1 VC pitch was scheduled in 12 weeks. The board needed someone who could stabilise the technology and own the investor narrative simultaneously.
Within 48 hours our fractional CTO conducted a full platform audit. The findings were stark: a PHP monolith with no test coverage, manual deployments via FTP, a single point of failure database with no read replicas, and no staging environment. Five engineers had no technical direction and were shipping directly to production.
Week one was triage. We implemented a staging environment, introduced Git branching, and stopped all direct production deployments. Weeks two through four extracted the payment processing module into an independently deployable service — the highest-risk component investors would scrutinise most. We achieved 85% automated test coverage on the payment module within six weeks. By week eight we had rebuilt the investor technology narrative, prepared detailed architecture documentation, and rehearsed the technical Q&A with the founding team.
The Series A closed at $4.2M — above the $3.5M target. The lead investor cited the quality of technology due diligence documentation as a key factor. Platform uptime moved from 97.2% to 99.9%. The engineering team tripled deploy frequency and reduced mean time to recovery from hours to under 15 minutes.
A fractional CTO is not just ongoing advisory — sometimes the most valuable thing is parachuting in at a critical moment and making something work within weeks.
Book a free call with a CTO who has 27 years of hands-on experience — and a track record of measurable outcomes.