You Raised a Seed Round and Have No CTO. Now What?

The round is closed. The money is in the bank. And somewhere between the champagne and the first board meeting, a question lands that did not matter last month: who owns the technology?

Plenty of companies raise a seed round in exactly this position. The product was built by an agency, a contractor, or a technical friend who has since moved on. It works well enough to win customers and convince investors. Nobody with equity can explain how it works.

That was fine at pre-seed. It stops being fine roughly the day the money arrives. This article covers why the moment changes, the three realistic ways to fill the gap, and what to do in your first 90 days regardless of which you choose.

Why this moment is different

Before the raise, your technology only had to work. After it, three new pressures arrive at once.

• **Investors expect an owner.** Your deck said the seed money would fund product and engineering. Someone has to turn that promise into a plan, and "our agency handles it" is not a name a board will accept for long.
• **Board meetings need technical answers.** Why did the release slip? What does it cost to serve each customer? What breaks first if usage triples? Guessing in front of your investors is worse than saying nothing.
• **Hiring starts immediately.** Most seed plans include engineering hires in the first two quarters. Someone has to write the job specs, run the interviews, and decide who is actually good. A recruiter cannot do that judgement for you.

There is a quieter fourth pressure: the next round. Series A due diligence will examine your codebase, your infrastructure, and your team. The habits you set in the six months after seed are what diligence finds twelve months later.

Your three realistic options

Founders in this position usually consider the same three moves. Each is right for somebody. The mistake is picking by instinct instead of by stage.

Option 1: recruit a full-time CTO

The obvious answer, and the most expensive one. A full-time CTO in London costs £120,000 to £180,000 or more in base salary, plus 1 to 4% equity, employer NI, pension, and often a recruitment fee of 20 to 30% of first-year salary. Expect the search to take three to six months, and add another three for notice periods.

That is a large slice of a typical seed round spent on one person before they have made a single decision. It makes sense when your entire company is a technology bet, when you are hiring five or more engineers in year one, or when a specific person you trust is available. Otherwise it is often the wrong tool at the wrong time.

There is also a selection problem. Without a technical person on your side of the table, you are interviewing for a role you cannot evaluate. Confident candidates who interview well are not always the ones who build well.

Option 2: hire or promote a senior engineer and grow them

Cheaper and sometimes excellent. A strong senior engineer costs £75,000 to £110,000 in London and can carry a small product a long way. If you already have a contractor or agency engineer who knows the codebase and shows judgement, converting them is worth serious thought.

The catch is that engineering skill and technology leadership are different jobs. Architecture under growth, hiring, vendor negotiation, and board communication are learned skills. Your seed round becomes the training budget, and the tuition is paid in mistakes.

This option works best when the person has visible appetite for the wider role and you can give them support: an advisor, a coach, or part-time senior cover while they grow.

Option 3: bring in a fractional CTO

A fractional CTO works with you part time, typically 2 to 6 days a month on a retainer of £1,500 to £6,000 per month, and starts within weeks rather than months. You get someone who has run engineering teams before, sits in your board meetings, oversees the agency, and runs your technical hiring.

What you do not get is a full-time presence. If your company needs someone in the building every day, this is a bridge, not a destination. The honest version of the model is exactly that: senior cover now, while the company grows into needing, affording, and being able to attract a full-time hire.

The first 90 days, whichever option you choose

Some work cannot wait for the perfect hire. Do these four things in the first quarter after the raise.

1. **Own your accounts and your IP.** Cloud accounts, domain names, code repositories, and app store listings should be in company-controlled accounts, not the agency's. Check your agency contract actually assigns you the IP. Founders discover the gap at the worst possible moment, usually during due diligence.
2. **Get an independent technical audit.** One written assessment of the codebase, infrastructure, and security posture, from someone who is not the people who built it. It costs a few thousand pounds and converts unknown risk into a list you can manage.
3. **Set a hiring plan against the runway.** Decide which engineering roles the seed plan actually needs, in what order, at what salary. Three considered hires beat six rushed ones.
4. **Establish reporting the board understands.** A monthly one-page technical update: what shipped, what slipped, current risks, current costs. It takes an hour to write and buys you enormous credibility.

The failure mode to avoid

The most common expensive mistake is hiring a full-time CTO too early. It usually goes like this: the board asks who owns technology, the founder feels the pressure, a search firm produces an impressive candidate from a large company, and the startup commits £150,000 a year plus equity.

Twelve months later the company has a beautifully documented technology strategy, two engineers, and eight months of runway. The CTO is bored, the founder is frustrated, and the equity is gone either way.

The rule of thumb: a full-time CTO makes sense when there is a full-time CTO's worth of work. Below roughly ten engineers, there rarely is. What exists below that line is two to six days a month of genuinely senior decisions, and 28 days of a team that needs to ship.

Using fractional as the bridge

The fractional model has a specific advantage in the post-seed moment that is easy to miss: it solves the selection problem for the full-time hire you will eventually make.

A fractional CTO who has been embedded for a year knows your stack, your team, and your real needs. When the time comes, they write the job description for their own replacement, run the interview loop, and evaluate candidates on substance rather than confidence. Some stay on the board or as an advisor afterwards. The handover is measured in weeks, not quarters.

That sequencing, senior cover now and a properly informed full-time hire later, costs a fraction of getting the order wrong.