Fractional CTO Services in Pune
The best Fractional CTO Services in Pune, at the best available price.
You have engineers, or contractors, or an agency, and no one whose job is to decide whether the architecture, the spend and the hiring plan are right. That is the gap: ten to twenty hours a month from someone who has built and run the thing you are building, and who will tell you when you are about to spend money you do not need to.
Pune combines two economies that buy software differently: a large IT services and product engineering base in Hinjewadi, Kharadi and Magarpatta, and one of India's main automotive and engineering manufacturing belts around Chakan and Pimpri-Chinchwad. Manufacturers here tend to be cautious buyers who want proof on their own plant data, while the technology companies expect engineering peers who fit into their sprints.
Mid-sized manufacturers and engineering firms around Pune are starting digital projects without a technology leader of their own. A fractional CTO sets priorities, selects vendors and checks their work, so the first projects produce something the plant actually uses.
What you get
- Architecture decisions made and written down, with the trade-offs stated rather than assumed
- Infrastructure and AI spend reviewed against what you actually use, not what you provisioned
- Hiring: what roles you need next, what to test for, and which hires to delay
- A technical voice in investor and customer conversations when you need one
- Honest counsel on build versus buy, including when the answer is to buy
Scoped to the hours you actually need. Month to month, with no long lock-in, because a fractional CTO you cannot leave is just an expensive employee.
Invoiced in INR, with GST as applicable.
Request a callback
You speak to the engineer who does the work. No sales rep, no deck.
Who builds here
AI Data Analyst
Pune's manufacturers and the engineering teams around them sit on production, quality and supply data that few people can query. A read-only analyst over that data is a contained first project with a visible result, and it needs no change to plant systems.
What Pune companies build with us
Get it built at $0.
That is not a discount. It is when you pay. The work is split into checkpoints with acceptance criteria written down before anything starts, and each checkpoint is invoiced only after you have seen it and accepted it. No deposit.
- $0 to start
- You hold every dollar until a checkpoint is delivered and you accept it. No approval, no invoice.
- Fixed cost, unlimited features
- Or hire the team outright: one fixed monthly cost, unlimited feature development, any stack.
- The engineer takes your call
- The person on your first call is the one who architects and writes it. No account managers, no bench time.
A US agency quotes $50,000 to $150,000 for the same build and asks for 40 to 50% of it before a line is written. Account managers, project managers, sales commission and bench time. None of it appears in your product.
Three stages, nothing hidden.
Twenty-minute call
We work out whether you need a fractional CTO at all. Plenty of teams need one good senior engineer instead, and that is a cheaper answer worth hearing.
First month, diagnostic
Architecture, infrastructure spend, delivery process and team shape reviewed, with the findings written down plainly and prioritised by what they cost you.
Ongoing retainer
A fixed block of hours each month. Regular reviews, decisions when they are needed, and direct access rather than a ticket queue.
What actually applies here.
Regulation and data
The DPDP Act 2023 covers employee and customer personal data alike, which matters for the HR, payroll and dealer systems many Pune companies run, and its Rules phase in through 2027 after notification in November 2025. Maharashtra's IT and ITeS Policy, 2023 lets IT parks be set up across the state and offers support for AI and emerging technology units, and the state's GCC Policy 2025, approved in September 2025, adds incentives for global capability centres. Automotive suppliers to global carmakers are often bound by customer information security requirements such as TISAX, which govern how design and plant data can be shared with outside engineers.
Contracting and payment
Simple domestic contracting. Invoices in INR with GST as applicable, under a standard services agreement. No cross-border payment friction, no forex conversion cost, and no time spent on paperwork for an overseas supplier.
Working hours
Same time zone. I work from India on IST, so calls, reviews and replies all happen inside your normal working day.
Can the AI analyst work with our ERP data?
Usually, through a read-only replica or a reporting database fed from the ERP, so the live system is never touched. We map the tables that matter, test the analyst against questions your team already answers by hand, and only then hand it over.
Our customer requires TISAX or similar controls. Can you work within them?
Yes, as far as an outside engineer can: named access, work only inside systems you control, no data copied to personal devices, and documented handover. Your assessment status remains your own, and we follow whatever controls your information security team sets.
Do we actually need a fractional CTO?
Often not, and you will be told so. If the real problem is that nobody is building fast enough, a senior engineer is a better spend. A fractional CTO earns its cost when the expensive decisions are the bottleneck: architecture, infrastructure spend, build versus buy, and who to hire next.
How is this different from an advisor?
An advisor gives opinions. This role makes decisions, writes them down, and is accountable for them. Where it helps, the work is done rather than delegated, including the parts that involve opening the codebase.
What happens to our existing team?
They keep building. The role is to remove the decisions that block them and to be honest with you about where the team is short, which is usually a smaller gap than founders fear.
Fractional CTO
Senior technical leadership, 10-20 hrs/month: architecture, AI strategy, cost control.