Teams Under 100 People
Teams that need senior technical leadership
You need direction, not another advisor. We embed with your team, set the operating cadence, and transfer knowledge so you can scale without a premature full-time CTO hire.
20+ Years Building and Scaling Software
AI Solutions for Real‑World Impact
We help operators turn AI from a demo into a system. Surton designs the context, workflow, and guardrails your team needs so AI actually shows up in the work — not just in the slide deck.
Featured LinkedIn post
Chris on why most founders end up underwhelmed when they try to stand up agentic AI on their own.
Trusted by both Startups and Scaleups
97% of companies investing in AI see positive ROI, but only 1% feel they've reached AI maturity. We bridge that gap.
Services
How We Can Help
We're AI practitioners who run our own company on AI. Whether the bottleneck is implementation, executive strategy, or a gap in technical leadership, each engagement model is built around a specific problem companies actually hire us to solve.
Every service has its own scope, proof, and delivery rhythm. Start with the one that matches your situation.
AI implementation
AI Implementation Services
For teams that need AI tied to a real operating process, clear constraints, and measurable output quality.
Workflow design Context engineering Pilot deployment
Best fit
- ✓ Leaders want AI tied to operating leverage, not a generic innovation narrative.
- ✓ The team already knows a few painful workflows that are repetitive, high-volume, or context-heavy.
Explore AI Implementation
Enterprise AI consulting
Enterprise AI Consulting
For leadership teams navigating AI pressure across multiple departments, systems, and stakeholder groups.
Use-case prioritization Governance design 90-day roadmap
Best fit
- ✓ Multiple departments are already experimenting, but there is no shared decision framework.
- ✓ The organization has real governance, compliance, or quality concerns and cannot rely on informal adoption.
Explore Enterprise AI Consulting
Fractional CTO
Fractional CTO Services
For founders and executive teams that need architecture, roadmap, hiring, and delivery leadership right away.
Technical audit Roadmap leadership Team guidance
Best fit
- ✓ You are between CTOs, preparing for a hire, or trying to avoid a premature executive search.
- ✓ The founder or CEO still carries too much of the technical decision load.
Explore Fractional CTO
Perfect for All Stages
Teams Under 50 People
Bootstrapped startups ready to scale
Elite engineering talent without enterprise overhead. Our fractional model gives you the output of one or two senior hires, with the flexibility to scale up or down as the work changes.
Companies 10+ Years Old
Established companies modernizing legacy systems
From the team that built BriteCore. We know how to layer in AI and modernize legacy systems without breaking what's already working.
AI Context Builder: battle-tested in production
Our in-house context engineering tool pulls knowledge from Slack, Jira, Confluence, and code repositories into a single layer the AI can actually reason over. Engineers, support staff, and executives can ask real questions of the codebase and get answers grounded in the work.
2x
Faster than legacy process
$1M
Engineering billing hours saved
100%
Customer Satisfaction
Our Process
Every company and every situation is different, but we always start by immersing ourselves in the real bottleneck to find the quickest path to business value. The same delivery rhythm powers our AI implementation , enterprise AI consulting , and fractional CTO engagements.
Step 1
Immerse
We start by getting inside the real workflow — the tech stack, the operating context, the people involved, and where the bottleneck actually sits. No generic discovery decks.
Step 2
Integrate
We embed inside your communication channels (Slack, Teams, email) and set a working cadence that keeps decisions, priorities, and follow-through visible to everyone involved.
Step 3
Organize
We build the documentation, flow diagrams, and action plans that make the work legible — for your team, for us, and for the AI systems that need that context to be useful.
Step 4
Optimize
We ship a narrow, usable version of the work, measure it against real output, and tighten the loop until the system is saving time in daily operations — not just in the demo.
Step 5
Support
We stay engaged through rollout, train your team on the new habit, and make sure what we built is something you can confidently own after we leave the room.
Don't Just Take Our Word For It
Steve Kinder
CTO, Paperplanes UK
Surton was an absolute pleasure to deal with. They completely understood what we wanted to achieve, and they delivered a truly fantastic deliverable, bang on time. The skills needed to do what they do for us is what we would have to hire 1 senior or 2 mid-level developers to achieve.
Alfero Chingono
VP Technology, VCA
Surton is a team of highly collaborative and adaptive experts who know how to get things done. They take the time to deeply understand the customer needs and meticulously map out a path to addressing those needs while maintaining clarity and alignment with all stakeholders.
Valerie Texin
CFO, Zeera
The Surton team have been brilliant partners from day one. They jumped in very quickly to manage all of our technical needs and are able to operate both autonomously and in tight coordination with our other business functions. With very limited handover, the Surton team was able to maintain continuity in all of our engineering processes and also seamlessly deliver customer specific enhancement work on tight timelines.
Ben Kistner
CEO, TurnTech Solutions
The Surton and Growth UX Studio team really made extensive efforts to understand the nitty gritty of our day to day processes to which they then applied their top-tier design skills. Their implementation of the design is so elegantly simple that we've already received positive feedback in our first few demos.
Dan Rundle
CEO, Worthwhile
Chris was very knowledgeable and responsive throughout the process. I have heard nothing but good things from my team, and I hope that we will continue to work together in the future.
Andrew Kwitko
CEO, Mapovis
Chris from Surton provided us with a great initial experience. He solved a tricky issue we had been struggling to fix for many hours in less than 30 minutes.
Anthony Shepherd
Owner, Sports BI
Chris and his team were very professional and diligent, despite an ever-changing scope of work from me and my clients. The back-end development and initial setup that they did has been seamless. I would recommend Surton to anyone.
Alan Hamid
Founder and CEO, Texila, Inc.
Surton understands the DNA of the startups and having advisors who have walked in the entrepreneurs' shoes, the service they provide is effective and efficient. Without Chris Reynolds's guidance it might have taken us weeks, what we have achieved in days.
Meet the Founders
Chris Reynolds
CEO, Founder
Chris co-founded BriteCore as CTO and spent a decade turning it into a category-defining insurance platform before it sold to private equity. 20+ years building cloud-native systems. Today he leads Surton's AI services work and co-hosts the Build Your Business podcast with Matt Reynolds (~400k weekly listeners). He writes The Blueprint, a weekly newsletter for operators on AI adoption, engineering leadership, and running a business without turning yourself into the bottleneck. Expect a strong point of view: small elite teams, rigorous documentation, automation-first, and context over prompts.
Ben Hayden
CTO, Founder
Ben is a hands-on technical leader with 16+ years of experience and AWS architecture credentials. He leads teams through large migrations, greenfield builds, and modernizations — turning ambiguous requirements into secure, scalable, cost-efficient systems. His work spans event-driven architectures, containers and serverless, data pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code. Before Surton, Ben was a founding engineer at BriteCore alongside Chris, where he helped shape the platform's architecture, CI/CD, and observability foundations and scaled cloud infrastructure to meet the demands of a regulated industry. Clients bring him in when there's no room for architectural drift.
Certifications
Writing
Latest from The Blueprint
Chris's weekly field notes on AI adoption, engineering leadership, and the operating decisions that make companies easier to run. Written from the work, not the sidelines.
AI
Why Executives Get Weak AI Results
Most disappointing AI output comes from poor context and poor system design, not from the model itself.
LeadershipOperations
Read article
Leadership
Why Q1 Became a Turning Point for Surton
Client demand finally caught up with Surton's early AI shift, changing the company's work, conversations, and direction in a single quarter.
StartupsAI +1
Read article
Leadership
Why Pain Tolerance Is a Founder Advantage
Founders do better when they stop treating chaos as a sign of failure and start building the capacity to operate through it.
StartupsStrategy
Read article
Ready to make AI useful inside your business?
Whether you need a working AI workflow, executive clarity before you scale, or senior technical leadership you can lean on, we've done this before. Bring us the bottleneck and we'll help you ship your way through it.