Fractional CTO for Startups Building AI-Agent, Identity & Payments Products
Executive-level technical leadership, 1–2 days a week, from an operator who has taken startups from first line of code to acquisition.
A fractional CTO gives your startup executive-level technical leadership 1–2 days a week — architecture, hiring, AI adoption, and investor diligence — without a $300K+ full-time hire. Lance Ennen takes a small number of fractional CTO engagements, focused on AI-agent systems, digital identity, and payments infrastructure. He has been first or early engineer at Factor75 (first line of code to $277M acquisition), Raise, and Obtiva (acquired by Groupon in 2011).
By Lance Ennen, Founder & Fractional CTO · Published September 4, 2026 · Last reviewed September 4, 2026
What You Get
Technology roadmap & architecture
A build plan tied to your runway: what to build now, what to defer, where the architectural one-way doors are, and reviews of the systems you already have.
AI adoption & agent strategy
Where AI agents genuinely help your product and process, where they are hype, and how to adopt them with permission boundaries, evals, and cost control.
Hiring & team leadership
Job specs, interview loops, and technical evaluation for your first engineers — and management of the team until a full-time leader takes over.
Investor & board support
Technical due-diligence preparation, architecture narratives for fundraising, and an experienced voice in board-level build/buy/partner decisions.
Who This Is For
- Pre-seed to Series A startups whose product is AI-agent, identity, or fintech infrastructure
- Non-technical founders who need someone to own the build and the hiring
- Funded teams facing an architecture decision that is expensive to get wrong
- Companies preparing for technical due diligence
Who This Is NOT For
- Teams that need a full-time CTO in the building every day — I will tell you that, and help you hire one
- Idea-stage projects that really need a prototype, not an executive
- Companies looking for a body-shop dev team wearing a CTO title
Not sure which you need? When to hire a fractional CTO — and when not to
Where I Go Deep
AI-agent startups
Most fractional CTOs advise on AI; very few operate it. I run AI coding agents (orchestrated with OpenClaw) inside my own development practice every day — planning work, writing code, and shipping alongside humans. That first-hand operating experience is what an agent-architecture review or agent-adoption roadmap is built on: workflow design, tool and permission boundaries, human-in-the-loop gates, evaluation, and token-cost control.
Digital identity & verifiable credentials
I co-founded and served as CTO of Cerebrum, a digital identity company — so identity is not a talking point, it is shipped product experience: credential issuance and verification flows, wallet UX trade-offs, and where decentralized identity actually earns its complexity. ByEnnen continues that thread with identity infrastructure APIs.
Payments & fintech infrastructure
From early engineering at Raise (gift-card marketplace) to building ByEnnen’s financial infrastructure APIs, I work on the plumbing where identity meets money: payment flows, compliance-aware architecture, and the emerging intersection of stablecoins, wallets, and agent-initiated transactions.
Track Record
Factor75 → $277M acquisition
Wrote the first line of code and built the early engineering foundation at Factor75, acquired by HelloFresh for $277 million in 2020.
Read the case study →Cerebrum — co-founder & former CTO
Co-founded the digital identity platform Cerebrum and served as CTO before moving to an advisory role in 2023.
See the work →Obtiva → Groupon
Consulted through Obtiva, the Chicago Ruby on Rails consultancy acquired by Groupon in 2011, alongside some of the best Agile engineers in North America.
Full background →Pairty & ByEnnen
Currently building: Pairty, and ByEnnen LLC — identity and financial infrastructure APIs (7N7D, IDSentric) — using an AI-native development practice.
View the case study →Naples & Miami, Florida
I'm based in Naples, Florida, and Miami is a frequent meeting point for startup consultations — you'll often find me at WeWork in Brickell. For South Florida companies that means real in-person time, not just video calls.
Everywhere else, engagements run remotely — the way most of my client work has operated for over a decade.
How Engagements Work
- 1
Discovery call
A conversation about your product, team, and the decisions in front of you — enough for both of us to know whether the fit is real.
- 2
Scoped proposal
Ongoing leadership (typically 1–2 days a week), a fixed-scope architecture or agent-adoption review, or diligence support — with cadence and deliverables agreed up front.
- 3
First 30 days
Deep review of the codebase, architecture, and team; a prioritized findings-and-roadmap document; and the first hiring or vendor decisions handled together.
- 4
Ongoing rhythm
Weekly working sessions, async access in your Slack, and quarterly re-scoping so the engagement shrinks or ends when you no longer need it.
Frequently Asked Questions
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