Profound IQ: How This Startup offers tech leadership on subscription
Building a technology-driven startup requires more than a compelling idea. It demands technical execution, sound architecture, and experienced leadership. Yet many founders who deeply understand their market lack the technical expertise to turn vision into working products.
The conventional solution—hiring a full-time chief technology officer—often comes with salaries and equity stakes that early-stage ventures cannot afford. For businesses where technology enables rather than defines the product, the practical question becomes: how can founders access senior technical leadership without a permanent executive hire?
Shrihari Shastry, Ankit Anand and Sonali Parate founded Profound IQ in 2025 to answer that question. Based in Bengaluru, the startup provides fractional CTO consulting and technical due diligence for investors.
From a Failed Product to a Service Model
The three co-founders previously built Lancers Club, investing ₹10 lakh of their own capital. When the venture failed to achieve product-market fit, they pivoted. Instead of continuing to build consumer products, they decided to apply their technical experience to help non-technical founders build and scale technology.
Shastry leads the fractional CTO practice, bringing more than 15 years of experience that includes roles at Barclays and 5x. Anand handles growth and operations, drawing on product marketing experience from B2B SaaS companies Zenduty and Xempla. Parate oversees design, with prior product and UI/UX work at 5x and Pepper Content.
Fractional CTO Services and Investor Due Diligence
Profound IQ’s core offering is fractional CTO support delivered on a monthly subscription basis rather than as a full-time role. “Fractional CTOs work closely with founders to understand their product vision and existing technology setup. Their role is about strategic technical leadership and roadmapping, not writing code,” Anand explains.
These CTOs develop technology roadmaps aligned with business goals, design scalable architectures, help build and manage engineering teams, and oversee development from planning through launch. The firm also offers contract-based minimum viable product (MVP) development. In these engagements, the team creates a six-month product roadmap, identifies critical features, and delivers a working product with essential functionality. This allows founders to test product-market fit, approach investors, or decide whether further investment is warranted.
In addition to founder-facing services, Profound IQ conducts technical due diligence for investors preparing for Series A or Series B rounds. Assessments cover code quality, scalability of the technology stack, the architecture’s capacity to handle increased load, CI/CD pipeline maturity, and the capabilities of the engineering team. Evaluations can be either detailed audits or higher-level reviews.
“Profound IQ operates primarily as a consulting firm, not a traditional IT services company. Our CTOs are responsible for business outcomes, not just deliverables,” Anand says. Each fractional CTO typically manages two clients at a time, with engagements priced around ₹3 lakh per month.
How Technology Decisions Are Made
Technology choices are driven by each client’s specific use case and vision. Profound IQ frequently works with Node.js and may recommend no-code tools for early-stage or budget-constrained startups. For better-funded companies, the firm helps assemble complete engineering teams that include backend and frontend developers as well as specialised roles.
On the hiring side, Profound IQ conducts the first two screening rounds. Candidates are profiled against role requirements and the startup’s stage, then evaluated on technical skill, problem-solving ability and startup mindset. Clients handle the final rounds, focusing on deeper technical discussions and cultural fit. “Our clients only interview candidates who’ve already cleared our technical and startup-fit assessment,” Anand notes. “It saves them time and ensures better quality hires.”
Who the Model Serves
The primary customers are non-technical founders at the idea or early stage who need technical execution capability without the cost and equity impact of a full-time CTO. The service also supports growth-stage companies that already have engineering teams but lack senior leadership or clear product-to-technology alignment, as well as businesses filling a temporary leadership gap after a CTO departure.
Profound IQ has worked with 25 clients so far. One example is Blitzgro, a consultancy serving restaurants and hotel chains that needed help building a technology product from scratch. The team validated the idea, designed the architecture and led development. Finspectors.ai already had an engineering team but required stronger leadership to streamline processes for scale. With Butter Money, which offers simplified home loans, the engagement centred on technology hiring, team building and creating a clear roadmap for growth.
Expansion Plans
The bootstrapped startup is shifting its geographic focus toward the United States, targeting 70–80% of revenue from the US market while retaining a 20–30% presence in India. Shrihari Shastry and Swarupa Vengurlekar currently serve as fractional CTOs, and the company is hiring a third full-time fractional CTO. The team of eight is also expanding its sales capacity to support this shift.
According to the Frak Conference State of Fractional Industry Report, the number of fractional leaders grew from 60,000 in 2022 to 120,000 in 2024, with business adoption expected to reach 35% by 2025. In this space, Profound IQ competes with firms such as Canada’s NuBinary and Toptal.
Looking ahead, the company plans to expand beyond pure fractional CTO services into subscription-based access to specific developer roles—backend, frontend and other specialised positions—on a contract basis. “This plug-and-play approach addresses demand from US-based companies looking to expand their teams without hiring and training overhead, particularly by building tech teams in India at a much lower cost,” Anand says.
By offering experienced technical leadership on flexible terms, Profound IQ is attempting to remove a common bottleneck for non-technical founders: the gap between a clear market insight and the ability to execute it in code. For early-stage companies that need strategic technology guidance without the full cost of a permanent CTO, the fractional model offers a practical middle path.