Fractional CTO  ·  Technical due diligence  ·  San Francisco Bay Area

I've already built the thing you're trying to build.

Employee #3 and the first technical hire at Altruist, now a $1.9B company. Eleven years at Chegg — its sixth employee, from Series A through the IPO and beyond, running 100+ engineers. Then I founded my own fintech and took it to revenue positive. Now I do this for early-stage founders, and I still write the code.

Start a conversation See how I work
Ashit Joshi, founder of The Inceptors
Ashit Joshi
Founder · The Inceptors
Track record — by the numbers
$1.9B
Valuation of Altruist today. I was the third employee and first technical hire.
100+
Engineers led across the US, India, Germany and Ukraine
0→30+
Engineering team built from scratch as CTO at Altruist
6
US patents in content delivery, publishing and data visualization
01 — The record

Evidence, not adjectives.

Most advisors sell a résumé. Here is what I actually owned, and what came out of it.

01
The Inceptors
2026 — Present
Founder & principal
Advisory · fractional CTO · diligence
Advising early-stage founders across AI, fintech and payments. I can tell you what not to do as clearly as what to do — you know your business, I'm the guard rails.
02
Afton Tickets
2025 — Present
Fractional CTO & advisor
Consumer & enterprise ticketing · $100M+ annual sales
Fractional CTO and advisor to the founders, managing the full development team for a platform running $100M+ in annual ticket sales. Leading the migration from a legacy monolith to a modular, scalable architecture built to compete with the incumbents, and improving engineering burn efficiency by 40%. Driving automation and AI adoption across the engineering org to bring speed and efficiency to development, debugging, monitoring and alerting. On call for the moments that matter — major client conversations, and containing fraudulent activity with throttling and detection plans that have saved the company both money and embarrassment.
03
Hey Emmy
2025 — Present
Founding fractional CTO
Consumer AI · family assistant
Built the AI-native backend: a durable memory layer that captures every email and input, categorizes and tags it, and persists it as structured, retrievable memory. That memory drives proactive surfacing — Emmy tells a busy family what needs their attention and lets them act on it, instead of waiting to be asked. The hard engineering is in making it trustworthy: entity extraction that doesn't mislabel, retrieval that scales past per-tenant vector limits, and agents that fail loudly rather than quietly reporting success they didn't deliver.
04
Monedo Financial Services
2024 — Present
CTO → Chief Information Security Officer
Consumer lending · India
Joined as Chief Technology Officer leading product, technology and design, and now serve as Chief Information Security Officer — owning security architecture and posture for a growing lending platform in the Indian market.
05
Equi
2024
Fractional CTO
Private placements · investment into private funds
Led product, technology and design at a private placement firm managing investment into private funds. Cut operating expenses 50% in under two months with zero impact to the business. Built real-time portfolio visibility and a risk dashboard for the investment team, and automated the monthly investor performance reporting workflow.
06
NuCash
2020 — 2024
Founder
Fintech · my own company
India's first financial super app for college students — banking, lending and investment. I was CTO, CPO and business development, and took the company to revenue positive. Built on Go and Python over Kubernetes, running under 100MB per pod.
07
Altruist
2018 — 2020
Founding CTO
Brokerage & custody · now a $1.9B company
Third employee and first technical hire, joining at Series A. Built the engineering team from 0 to 30+ and the platform for independent RIAs from scratch — digital account opening, brokerage and trading on DriveWealth then Apex Clearing, portfolio reporting via Schwab and TD Ameritrade, automated rebalancing, fractional shares and a model portfolio marketplace. Took the company through its SOC 1 audit.
08
Rocket Lawyer
2018
Chief Technology Officer
Legal tech · consumer & SMB
Led 100+ across product, engineering and program management. Delivered GDPR compliance end to end and refocused the roadmap on revenue-driving product lines.
09
Chegg
2007 — 2018
Developer → VP Engineering
Consumer education · NYSE: CHGG
Joined as the sixth employee. Over eleven years I saw Chegg go from Series A through its IPO and beyond, scaling to 800+ people while I ran an engineering organization of 100+ across four countries and six business lines — rebuilding the platform from a Drupal monolith to a scaled service architecture. Along the way I supported technical due diligence on 7+ acquisitions, running intense M&A diligence on the companies Chegg acquired.
Six US patents
02 — How I work

Three ways in. Pick the one that matches where you are.

No open-ended retainers, no discovery calls that go nowhere. Each engagement has a defined scope, a defined output, and a defined price.

Start here

Diligence sprint

Two weeks · fixed fee

A straight answer about whether your architecture, your AI approach and your team will survive the next 18 months — the same technical due diligence I've run on 7+ M&A deals, pointed at your company.

  • Architecture and code-quality assessment
  • AI system review: model routing, cost model, failure modes
  • Security and compliance gap analysis
  • 90-day roadmap you can hand to your team
Book a sprint →
Most common

Fractional CTO

$8–25K / mo · by scope

Senior technical judgment on tap, for founders who have an engineering team but no one senior enough to own the hard calls.

  • Architecture ownership and technical decisions
  • Engineering hiring, leveling and team design
  • AI and infrastructure cost control
  • Board and investor technical narrative
  • On call when it counts — key client calls, incidents, fraud response
Discuss a retainer →
Full ownership

Founding team

Monthly + equity

For the funded, non-technical founder who needs the whole zero-to-one function — not advice about it.

  • I own product, engineering and AI end to end
  • A delivery pod ships under my architecture and standards
  • Go-to-market input from someone who has carried a number
  • You get a technical co-founder without the search
See if we fit →
03 — Where I go deep

One specialty, and four things around it.

I'm not a generalist agency. These are the areas where I've shipped production systems and can give you a real answer in the first meeting rather than the fourth.

01

Wealth infrastructure — RIA, brokerage & private funds

Public markets: I built a custodial and brokerage platform for independent RIAs from an empty repository — digital account opening, funding, trading, clearing, rebalancing and reporting. Not integrated into someone else's rails; I built the rails. Private markets: technology leadership at a private placement firm investing into private funds, where the hard problems are investor reporting, risk visibility and operational control rather than trade execution. Very few engineers have built on both sides of that line.

Apex ClearingDriveWealthSchwab · TD AmeritradeDigital account openingAutomated rebalancingModel portfolio marketplaceFractional sharesPrivate placementsPrivate fund investingInvestor reportingRisk dashboardsSOC 1
02

Payments, lending & risk

Consumer lending, payment orchestration and fraud — built inside real regulatory constraints rather than around them.

Consumer lendingPayment orchestrationFraud & riskPCI scopeGDPRLedger design
03

AI systems in production

Not demos. Systems that stay correct, stay affordable, and fail loudly instead of quietly when the model is wrong.

LLM & agentic appsAgent memory systemsProactive surfacingStructured output validationVector search & RAGModel routing & costEvalsGuardrails
04

Product & go-to-market

I founded my own company and had to find the customer, not just build for them. That changes what I tell you to build first.

0→1 productPricingPositioningBusiness developmentInvestor narrativeFundraising
05

Engineering organizations

Hiring the first ten, then the next ninety — across four countries. Plus the operational discipline that separates teams that ship from teams that thrash.

Hiring & levelingDistributed teamsOffshore & nearshoreDelivery processMonolith decompositionPlatform architectureBurn efficiency
04 — Founders I've worked with

Two decades of it. Eight people to eight hundred, then zero to one again.

Some as CTO, some as founder, some as the advisor who kept a team out of a hole. Filter by what you're closest to.

Hey Emmy
Founding fractional CTO
Consumer AI assistant

The AI-native backend — memory capture, tagging and retrieval that turns a family's inbox into things Emmy surfaces and acts on.

libb.ai
Go-to-market advisor
AI writing & language

Backed the founder in the earliest stage on go-to-market for an AI product that sharpens how people write and communicate.

StckdApp
AI-first build
Sneaker community app

Took a barely-functional app and built it end to end into a rich, feature-complete product with an AI-first development approach — a community for sneakerheads.

Afton Tickets
Fractional CTO
Consumer & enterprise ticketing · $100M+ annual sales

Fractional CTO and advisor to a consumer and enterprise ticketing platform running $100M+ in annual sales — monolith to modular architecture, full development-team management, AI-driven engineering, 40% better burn efficiency, and fraud containment when it counts.

Equi
Fractional CTO
Private funds & placements

Private placements into private funds. 50% operating cost cut in under two months, plus real-time portfolio and risk tooling.

Monedo
CTO → CISO
Consumer lending

Led product, technology and design; now own security architecture for a lending platform in India.

NuCash
Founder
Fintech super app

My own company, taken to revenue positive. Banking, lending and investment for college students.

Altruist
Founding CTO · Employee #3
Brokerage & custody

Founding CTO and first technical hire at Series A. Team and platform from zero. Now a $1.9B company.

Rocket Lawyer
CTO
Enterprise legal tech

Ran technology, product and program management for a 100+ person organization — delivered GDPR compliance end to end and refocused the roadmap on revenue-driving lines.

Chegg
Founding engineer → VP Eng
Consumer edtech

Sixth employee. Rode Chegg from Series A through its IPO and beyond — to 800+ people — running a 100+ engineering org across four countries, plus technical due diligence on 7+ acquisitions.

05 — Who I work with

Not one vertical — the hard parts every serious product shares.

Wealth and capital markets, payments and lending, AI, consumer and enterprise software, edtech, legal tech. I've shipped in production in each. Find the proof nearest your sector.

Wealth & capital markets Payments & lending AI systems Consumer & enterprise Edtech Legal tech
See all six industries →
06 — Start a conversation

Tell me what you're building.

Fill in the form and I'll come back within two business days. If there's a fit, the next step is a 45-minute call where I'll give you a real technical opinion — not a sales pitch.

If you're an investor looking for technical diligence on a live deal, say so in the form and mark it urgent. Those get answered same day.

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