CTO Grand Rounds

38+
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.

Corby, UK Author 17 sectors Boards, investors & scaling businesses Public safety, health, banking & justice

Full experience

26+
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.

Gloucester, UK Platform recovery Product and engineering strategy Vendor and technical due diligence

Full experience

40+
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.

Brisbane, Australia UK & Australia Digital transformation Health & care sector Board advisory (NED/Interim)

Full experience

18+
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.

London, UK AI transformation AI in financial services Clinical AI LLMs & agentic AI DPhil AI, Oxford

Full experience

28+
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.

London, UK Applied AI & enterprise adoption WealthTech & family office technology High-performance team coaching

Full experience

27+
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.

Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Enterprise technology & data modernization Security, risk & compliance (SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA) Large-scale program & operations leadership

Full experience

32+
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.

Greater Dundee Area, UK Precision medicine & drug discovery Organoid biology, disease modelling & assay development Commercial translation for biotech & pharma

Full experience

14+
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.

Canada AI agents Fintech & credit Early-stage MVPs Full-stack architecture Startup to enterprise

Full experience

25+
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.

Sydney, Australia Scale-ups, pivots & health services Medical devices, AI, robotics, aerospace Single-owner projects to 400-person global teams

Full experience

15+
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.

Berlin, Germany Regulated SaaS, FinTech & RegTech AI, compliance, Web3 & health PhD in Computer Science

Full experience

20+
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.

London Area, United Kingdom Founders, CEOs & leadership teams Connected hardware, IoT, SaaS/data & AI-enabled products Product launch to international scale

Full experience

15+
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.

Eindhoven, Netherlands Founders, scale-ups & investors Medical devices, emotion AI, care robotics & surgical tech

Full experience

25+
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.

Munich Area, Germany Biotech, pharma & digital pathology From research to product Early prototype to early scaling

Full experience

Meet the CTOs

Neil Catton

Jerome MacGillivray

Andrew Frith

Berkan Sesen

Neil Taggart

Amer Murad

Elad Katz

Carlos Blanco

Gabriel Wainmann

Marton Csernai

Ryan Sanderson

Reon Smits

Arno Schaepe