A fractional CTO you can actually meet in person.
Shivam Ghiya is a fractional CTO based in Vadodara, Gujarat, working with founder-led companies across India for two to six days a month. Roadmap ownership, AI strategy, process automation and systems architecture, without a full-time CTO salary.
Vadodara, and a calendar.
Being in Gujarat matters less than founders expect and more than remote-first advisers admit.
Most of the work happens over calls and written architecture, and always has. But the diagnostic, the two to three weeks of mapping how a business actually runs, is meaningfully better in a room. You learn more watching someone do their job for an hour than from six calls asking them to describe it.
So for companies in Vadodara, Ahmedabad and Surat, the opening stretch of an engagement is usually on site. After that it settles into whatever rhythm suits the business, and plenty of clients I have worked with for years I now see twice a quarter.
Outside Gujarat, and outside India, everything runs remotely. Current clients are in India, the United Kingdom and Australia, which means an early call and a late one are both normal parts of the week.
What Gujarat companies actually ask for.
The mix here skews operational: manufacturing-adjacent businesses, insurance agencies, healthcare groups and brokerages, most of them founder-led and past the point where spreadsheets hold.
Healthcare
Patient intake, records, care coordination
Insurance
Policy ERP, agent portals, claims workflow
Real Estate
Listings, lead routing, sales pipelines
Fintech
Investment platforms, encrypted partner APIs
Logistics
Bookings, driver allocation, automated invoicing
Accounting
GST e-invoicing, ledgers, role-based access
Good businesses, held together by one person's memory.
Gujarat has a lot of profitable, decades-old, founder-led companies. That is exactly the profile most likely to have outgrown its systems without noticing.
The pattern repeats with unusual consistency here. A business that grew on relationships and operational discipline rather than software. A spreadsheet that became load-bearing. A shared admin login nobody wants to be the one to change. Two or three tools bought over the years that have never been introduced to each other. And a founder who is, functionally, the integration layer between all of it.
None of that is a failure. It is what success looks like right before the systems need to catch up. The work is usually less dramatic than people fear: mapping how things actually run, deciding what should own what, and removing the two or three manual steps that everything else waits on.
The other local reality is vendor quality. There are strong development agencies in Gujarat and there are weak ones, and from the inside of a non-technical business they are genuinely hard to tell apart. A good deal of what I do for companies here is reading a proposal properly and asking the three questions that separate the two.
Working with someone local.
Anything not answered here, ask me directly on the call.
Yes, and for companies in Vadodara, Ahmedabad and Surat the opening diagnostic is usually on site. Watching someone do their job for an hour tells you more than six calls asking them to describe it. After the diagnostic, most engagements settle into a mix of on-site and remote.
No. The practice is based in Vadodara but current clients are in India, the United Kingdom and Australia. Being local changes how the first few weeks run, not whether the engagement is a fit.
Founder-led businesses of roughly 10 to 150 people that have outgrown spreadsheets and shared logins: insurance agencies, healthcare groups, real estate brokerages, accounting practices and manufacturing-adjacent operations. The common trait is real technology spend with nobody senior accountable for it.
Substantially, because you are buying days rather than a salary, equity and a six-to-nine-month search. The more useful comparison is against the cost of the decisions currently being made without senior input: a failed CRM migration or a platform rebuilt three years early usually dwarfs either figure.
That is one of the most common arrangements. I produce the architecture and hold delivery to it while your agency builds. It also tends to be the point at which vendor quotes start getting more accurate, because someone on your side is now reading them properly.
Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 19:00 IST for scheduled work. Because clients span India, US, the UK and Australia, an early call and a late one are both normal parts of the week, and urgent matters go to WhatsApp rather than email.
Based in Vadodara. Working everywhere.
Thirty minutes, no pitch. In person if you are in Gujarat, over a call if you are not. The conversation is the same either way.