You bring one thing keeping you up.
Architecture that won't scale, an AI bet you can't undo, a first senior engineering hire, a vendor that's failing, a migration that's stuck.
CTO
Grand
Grand
Rounds
Stuck on a technical decision you can't afford to get wrong?
Bring it to two senior CTOs who've already made the same call. A live session, straight talk.
Apply
It's free for founders
In medicine, Grand Rounds is where difficult cases get reviewed by a panel of specialists. This is the same thing, for technology.
Jane Vyshnova
Curator of Grand Rounds
How it works
One case. Two vetted CTOs. A direction you can act on.
Two senior CTOs work it live
They ask the questions you didn't think to ask yourself, challenge what you've taken for granted, and share how they solved the same thing before, leaving you with a clear direction you can act on.
Follow-up within 48 hours
A short written summary of what the panel found, what they disagreed on, and what they recommend you do next. Clear enough to act on.
Our network includes CTOs, engineering leaders,
and technical advisers with experience at and around companies such as:
We currently selected 19 senior fractional CTOs. People who actually built and scaled products, not just sat in big companies.
When founders bring a case, we don't hand them a generalist. We take a look at their domain and choose the two or three people who have been there:
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Health and biomed
Fintech and payments
Fashion and retail
Deep tech, hardware and simulation
AI, data and security
Meet the CTOs
Not résumés. The decisions, scars and turning points behind them,
so you know
exactly who's reviewing your case.
38+
years of experience
years of experience
Neil Catton
Fractional CTO/CIO & Board Adviser — AI Governance & Technology Strategy
Neil began writing code for the nuclear industry three decades ago and has since held CTO, Chief Architect, and Director roles at BT, Wipro, Fujitsu, Sopra Steria, and Capita - spanning a £1.5bn digital transformation and a landmark Google data partnership at BT, a $1bn health infrastructure programme serving 400 million people across 11 medical cities and 6,500 remote clinics at Wipro, and a five-year strategic roadmap for UK Government Home Affairs at Fujitsu.
Full experience
26+
years of experience
years of experience
Jerome MacGillivray
Fractional CTO — technology strategy, delivery recovery and engineering leadership
Jerome MacGillivray has spent more than twenty-five years leading global technology teams and delivering digital platforms across regulated, customer-facing and operationally complex environments. His experience spans fintech, retail, travel, cybersecurity, robotics and AI, with roles covering CTO leadership, engineering scale-up, vendor management, platform delivery and technical recovery. He works with founders, boards and leadership teams to make technology decisions clearer, delivery more predictable, and engineering more closely aligned with business priorities.
Full experience
40+
years of experience
years of experience
Andrew Frith
Fractional CTO/CIO — Health & Care, Government, Commercial | ex-NHS, ex-InHealth
With a career spanning founding and co-founding technology businesses, consultancy, interim executive, and non-executive board roles across the NHS, government, charity, and commercial sectors, Andrew has spent close to four decades helping organisations use information and technology to drive meaningful change.
Full experience
18+
years of experience
years of experience
Berkan Sesen
Applied AI Adviser — Oxford DPhil, ex-J.P. Morgan, UBS, Citi
Berkan has worked on AI in high-stakes settings since 2009, starting with an Oxford DPhil in AI and Medical Informatics, where he built clinical decision support systems that predicted patient outcomes and recommended treatment, published in leading medical and interdisciplinary journals. He has published on AI continuously since, most recently on the evaluation of retrieval-augmented LLMs in clinical use, and writes for industry on AI transformation and clinical AI.
Full experience
28+
years of experience
years of experience
Neil Taggart
Fractional CTO & Board Adviser — Applied AI, WealthTech and High-Performance Teams in Regulated Markets
Neil Taggart has spent his career leading technology and product functions across financial services, wealth management and, more recently, applied AI. His experience includes two CTO roles in regulated financial markets, nearly nine years leading technology for a global strategy-execution consultancy through its acquisition by a Fortune 1000 firm, and building the technology function for a Family Office wealth management business, alongside hands-on AI coaching and product work with Tribe AI and Anthropic.
Full experience
27+
years of experience
years of experience
Amer Murad
Fractional CTO/CIO & Board Adviser — Enterprise Modernization, Security & Compliance and Large-Scale Operations in Regulated Industries
Amer Murad has spent 27+ years leading technology, product and operations functions across healthcare, human capital management, education, telecom and banking. His experience includes CTO and CIO roles spanning organizations from a 300-person SaaS communications platform to a 10,000-employee not-for-profit healthcare provider, 16 years at Ceridian leading product development, technology innovation and DevOps for global HCM and payroll platforms, and building a compliance and governance function from scratch for a 45-year-old software company through its growth by acquisition. He is TOGAF 9 certified in enterprise architecture.
Full experience
32+
years of experience
years of experience
Elad Katz
Fractional CTO — Precision Biology, Drug Discovery & Translational Science in Regulated Industries
Elad Katz has spent over two decades working at the intersection of deep biological science and commercial reality, leading translational research and venture creation across oncology, kidney, liver, cardiac, bone and women's health. His experience spans founding and leading Navigate Precision Biology, where he built the NaviPlate organoid platform from academic concept through customer discovery to commercial validation, alongside senior scientific and R&D leadership roles at Sartorius Stedim BioOutsource, amsbio, and the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD in Immunology from the University of Glasgow and a BSc in Chemistry and Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Full experience
14+
years of experience
years of experience
Carlos Blanco
Fractional CTO / Co-Founder — ex-TransUnion
Carlos spent 14 years inside TransUnion, moving from software developer to DevOps engineer to Product Owner, learning exactly how large financial institutions think, what slows them down, and where the cracks are. Then he left to help founders build things faster than those institutions ever could.
Full experience
25+
years of experience
years of experience
Gabriel Wainmann
Fractional CTO / VP R&D — Clinical AI, Robotics & Complex Systems
Gabriel began his career as a technical systems analyst and test engineer in the Israeli Air Force, reaching the rank of Major and taking part in several satellite launches, before leading system engineering and testing on large multidisciplinary programmes at Israel Aerospace Industries. He went on to senior system engineering and technical product roles at Orbotech and OSR Enterprises, then moved into regulated medical devices in Sydney as Technology Development Lead at Nanosonics and Principal Engineer for robotics and automation across Cochlear's global manufacturing operations.
Full experience
15+
years of experience
years of experience
Marton Csernai
Fractional CTO & AI Engineer — AI for High-Compliance B2B SaaS
Márton began his career in research, completing a PhD in computer systems and networking at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, with a research internship at Deutsche Telekom's T-Labs in Berlin, followed by four years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he published peer-reviewed research in neuroscience and distributed systems. He moved to Berlin to join KILT Protocol as Research Lead, Product Owner and Full Stack Developer, designing its self-sovereign digital identity protocol and token economics, authoring its white paper, and leading delivery from research through to mainnet, including a Deloitte-partnered KYC integration.
Full experience
20+
years of experience
years of experience
Ryan Sanderson
Fractional CTO/CPO — Technology Strategy & Commercialisation
Ryan is an electrical and electronic engineer who began his career as a semiconductor market analyst at IMS Research, later IHS, where over a decade he built one of the industry’s leading wireless-power research practices and led international analyst teams to around 64% year-on-year revenue growth. He has worked with Aircharge for eleven years, progressing from commercial development to CTO and Managing Director, and now serves on its board as a Non-Executive Director. There he helped lead the evolution of a wireless-charging hardware business into an international physical-digital platform spanning hardware, SaaS, IoT and data, deployed across 4,500+ venues in 45+ countries with major global hospitality, QSR and technology brands.
Full experience
15+
years of experience
years of experience
Reon Smits
Fractional CTO — MedTech, Regulated AI & Hardware
Reon began his career as an electronic engineer at TEGEMA, a high-tech engineering company in the Eindhoven Brainport region, designing electronics and electrical systems for machines and products in semiconductor, life science and automotive markets, including his first medical products.
Full experience
25+
years of experience
years of experience
Arno Schaepe
Fractional CTO — Scientific Computing, AI & Data for Life Sciences
Arno is a mathematician who has spent more than 25 years building software that applies algorithms and machine learning to life science questions, long before “AI” became the word for it. He joined Definiens as a software developer in 1998 and spent over two decades there, progressing through Director of Platform Development, Chief Architect, VP Product Development and VP & Chief Architect to VP Product & Innovation at Definiens, The Tissue Phenomics Company. Along the way he took the company’s image analysis technology from an early prototype to its core product, was responsible for that product for many years, and later brought up and matured new products and technologies in digital and computational pathology. Since 2020 he has been CTO of Noselab, a Munich biotech company, where he built the entire digital side of the business, from software and IT to data, along with the team behind it, working hands-on throughout. He is a named inventor on multiple patents in image analysis, has co-authored publications on tissue phenomics and cancer research, and serves as a panel CTO with CTO Grand Rounds. He holds a Diplom in Mathematics from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Full experience
What founders walk
away with:
Join the next session
- the questions and risks they hadn't seen yet
- a technical direction that's either validated
or honestly challenged - clear next steps
- a warm intro to any CTO they want to keep talking to
What founders say after their Grand Rounds session
It's like a hackathon for your real business problems. You bring your challenges and bright minds work on them - with no obligation, no pressure. I walked away with perspectives on investors, encryption solutions, and a connection that could directly benefit my product. Honestly, why rely on one mind, when you can have many?
Saif Alam
CEO at Keepsta
It was an incredibly welcoming space to connect with senior technical minds I wouldn't normally have access to as a non-technical founder. A fantastic opportunity to get real, honest answers to the challenges I was facing - and to walk away with meaningful connections who continue to support me.
Audrey Lee
Founder of Lumi
CTO Grand Rounds was the best event by far. This is where the founder world and the tech world actually merge, with real introductions instead of leaving people to stay siloed. I was deep in a conversation about cybersecurity and feedback loops - practical advice I could act on immediately.
Hélène Le Roux
CEO at Trippin'
What I valued most was the mix of CTO styles at the table - some all-in on AI, others more measured. As a founder, you don't want someone else's answer, you want enough perspectives to make your own call. I walked away with two strong contacts - people who hit the mark on build support, strategic fit, and investor credibility. The relaxed format made room for real technical conversation, not just quick decisions. Worth coming back for.
Hew Williams
Founder of Zeorb
David Carroll
Founder of EuryanDavid came to Grand Rounds with two open questions he wanted pressure-tested before taking them to investors: how Euryan should handle LLM and cloud strategy across different client environments, and whether the core product wedge, dynamic FMEA/8D automation, was the right foundation to build the rest of the roadmap on.
The panel
Neil Catton
38 years across 17 sectors
Edoardo Turelli
20+ years in technology and CTO leadership, most recently Interim CTO
at Monolith AI
I was surprised by the seniority of the CTOs and the breadth of scope of discussion, with great debate around both technical, architectural topics, as well as business planning for future funding rounds.
I find open networking of limited value, but this format has opened my eyes to a potential route that helps Euryan's validation in the future. I am already connecting with both Neil and Edoardo to discover future opportunities to collaborate.
Susie Williams
Founder of LinkEDtohomeSusie came to Grand Rounds with two questions she wanted pressure-tested before LinkEDtohome moved beyond its first school: how to scale the team and technology without building too far ahead of real demand, and what needed to be in place around AI liability, training and governance before broader adoption.
The panel
Neil Catton
38 years across 17 sectors, including education platforms and
learning-provider systems
Jerome MacGillivray
26 years of experience, technology leader behind the rebuild of the
NSPCC's Childline platform
The most useful part for me was how well matched Neil and Jerome were to our business. Their experience meant they already understood many of the complexities of working within education and safeguarding, so we didn't have to spend the session explaining the world LinkEDtohome operates in.
The session definitely made us think more carefully about scalability, both in terms of how we grow the team around LinkEDtohome and what the technology itself needs to cope with as we grow. We've already started looking at what that means practically for the next stage of the business.
Alexander Gorrie
FounderAlex came to CTO Grand Rounds with several important technical decisions already being actively worked through. One question from the panel reframed the discussion: “How will you know that the result is actually good?” It sharpened the conversation around how those decisions should be sequenced and prioritised.
The panel
Berkan Sesen
18+ years across financial services, clinical AI and applied AI product
leadership, including two ML-powered funds at J.P. Morgan and the algorithmic execution
platform at UBS
The session helped us sharpen how we think about the sequencing of some important technical decisions. Having our assumptions challenged in the context of the actual product was particularly useful and gave us a clearer framework for prioritising the work ahead.
Tomas Jankauskas
Founder of Neural DEEPTomas came to Grand Rounds with a question he'd been wrestling with while bringing AI-driven innovation into Toyota: which ideas to pursue, and how much to build before anything was approved, in an organisation where every new idea needs to pass through many hands.
The panel
Neil Catton
38 years across 17 sectors, including consultancy work across the
automotive industry
Thomas Döhler
25 years in software and technology leadership, including founding member
of Amazon's Development Center in the Netherlands, leading software development at frog
design, and running teams supplying the automotive industry
Your session helped me so much to understand hidden business opportunities. Neil and Tom were the right match. They're experts with so much experience, they could tell what I'm doing before I even started talking.
I was always juggling whether I should be more humble or go grandiose. I think you need to have both and be smart. Here I got both encouragement and some caution, which is great, because you trust people who went through similar hurdles.
29th September
CTO Grand Rounds Networking Event: Sifted Summit Edition
Hosted in London, our Sifted Summit side event brought CTOs, founders and investors together to exchange ideas, discuss technical decisions and make new connections over a relaxed atmosphere.
8th June
CTO Grand Rounds Networking Event
Founders, CTOs, partners and friends of Grand Rounds gathered in London for a relaxed evening of conversation around product, technology and scaling challenges.
Apply for
a session spot
Two cases per session, selected for quality and relevance. Tell us about your technical problem — we'll confirm within a few days.
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Bring us your case
Book 20 minutes with Jane, who runs Grand Rounds.
Tell her what you're wrestling with, and she'll line up the two CTOs who've solved it before.
If it's not a fit, she'll tell you straight and point you somewhere better.
Pick a time
FAQ