Fractional CTO in Stockholm
Expert technical leadership for Stockholm startups. CTO services in CET/CEST timezone. Build, scale, and transform your product without full-time CTO costs.
Why Stockholm Startups Choose Fractional CTO
Stockholm is the world leader in unicorns per capita. The city has produced companies like Spotify, Klarna, King, and many others. Strong engineering culture, excellent education system, and developed ecosystem make it one of the best places for tech startups. Industries like FinTech, Gaming, Music Tech, CleanTech, and Enterprise SaaS thrive here.
However, the Stockholm ecosystem creates unique challenges: intense competition for talent with Spotify, Klarna, and other unicorns, high salary expectations (SEK 1.5M-2.5M for CTOs), and strict Swedish regulatory requirements. Many startups find that traditional full-time CTO hiring is impractical at early stages.
Common Challenges
- Competition for talent with Spotify, Klarna, and other unicorns
- High salary expectations (SEK 1.5M-2.5M for CTOs)
- Finansinspektionen requirements for fintech
- Need to comply with GDPR and Swedish regulations
- Investor expectations to meet ecosystem standards
- Competition for talent with Spotify, Klarna, and other unicorns
- High salary expectations (SEK 1.5M-2.5M for CTOs)
- Finansinspektionen requirements for fintech
- Need to comply with GDPR and Swedish regulations
- Investor expectations to meet ecosystem standards
How Fractional CTO Solves Them
- Access to experienced CTO without Stockholm salary premiums (SEK 800K-1.5M+ savings annually)
- Start immediately — without 3-6 month hiring process
- Scale engagement up/down as you progress through funding rounds
- Expertise in building distributed teams with remote-first focus
- Global best practices with understanding of Scandinavian market
What I do
- Tech stack selection for Scandinavian talent market
- Launch in 3-4 months with scalable foundation
- GDPR-ready architecture from day one
- Handle 10x growth without failures
- Technical debt management and refactoring
- Prepare for Scandinavian VC due diligence
- LLM integrations and GPT-based solutions
- ML systems for competitive advantage
- Strategy, implementation, and MLOps
- Code quality and architecture review
- Prepare for Scandinavian VC due diligence
- Risk map and recommendations
- Comprehensive technical risk assessment
- Team and product scalability analysis
- Reports for investment committees
- Navigate competitive Stockholm talent market
- Build hybrid teams (local + remote engineers)
- Implement unicorn-level engineering culture
Pricing
Packages for Stockholm Startups
Contract Length:
Advisor CTO
$3,600per month
6 hours per week, 24 hours per month
For early-stage startups with an MVP or an idea that need oversight and support without full-time involvement.
- 2 strategic sessions per month (90 minutes each)
- Technical stack and architecture audit
- Slack support (48-hour response time)
- Hiring support: candidate reviews and recommendations
What's included:
- 6-month technical roadmap
- Architecture guidelines document
Outcome:A clear plan and recommendations for technology and team development without the overhead of a full-time CTO.
Contract term:1 month
Growth CTO
Most popular$6,000per month
10 hours per week, 40 hours per month
Post-Seed to Series A startups actively building product and team (3 to 10 engineers).
- Weekly call with founders (1 hour)
- Bi-weekly sprint reviews with the team
- Active hiring involvement: sourcing, interviews, offers, onboarding
- Product architecture and technical roadmap ownership
- Emergency availability for critical situations
- Slack support (24-hour response time)
What's included:
- Quarterly OKRs for the technical team
- Hiring playbook for first 5-10 engineers
- Architecture Decision Records (ADR)
Outcome:A solid technical foundation and team ready for rapid growth and product scaling without chaos.
Contract term:from 3 months
Scale CTO
$12,000per month
≈3 days per week, 80 hours per month
Series A+ startups with 15-20+ engineers preparing for the next funding round.
- Everything from Growth CTO package
- Participation in executive meetings and investor discussions
- Building engineering management team (leads, engineering managers)
- Due diligence support for fundraising
- Organizational design: team structure, processes, rituals
- Technical debt strategy and refactoring roadmap
- Vendor and partner negotiations (AWS, third-party services, contractors)
What's included:
- Engineering handbook and team culture code
- Leveling and compensation framework
- Engineering metrics dashboards (DORA, velocity, code quality, etc.)
- Incident management and on-call rotation
Outcome:A mature engineering organization with clear processes, metrics, and a culture of product ownership.
Contract term:from 6 months
How Remote Work Functions for Stockholm Startups
- Working hours overlap: 2-3 hours overlap with CET (9:00-18:00) for strategic calls and synchronous work
- Communication rhythm: Weekly strategic calls with founders, bi-weekly team sync, daily async interaction via Slack
- In-person visits: Quarterly visits to Stockholm available for Scale CTO and above packages. Available for board meetings and investor presentations
How it works
Week 1: Onboarding and Audit
5 daysMeet the team, review codebase, identify critical issues, create initial roadmap.
Month 1: Quick Wins and Foundation
4 weeksAddress critical issues, set up development processes, code reviews, begin architectural improvements.
Month 2-3: Scaling and Growth
8 weeksImplement architectural improvements, optimize performance, hire and mentor team.
Understanding Stockholm Startup Ecosystem
- Fintech and payment systems (Klarna ecosystem)
- Gaming and Entertainment
- Music Tech (Spotify ecosystem)
- CleanTech and Sustainability
- Enterprise SaaS
- Developer tools and products
- Familiar with EQT Ventures, Northzone, Creandum and others' expectations
- Help defend technical architecture to Scandinavian investors
- Experience with Nordic and pan-European VCs
- GDPR compliance (General Data Protection Regulation)
- Swedish financial regulations (Finansinspektionen)
- PSD2 for payment services
- SOC2 Type II for enterprise clients
Frequently asked questions
Related services
Ready to Start Working with a Fractional CTO in Stockholm?
Start with a free 30-minute consultation. We'll discuss your goals, challenges, and determine how I can help.