Vedran Balagović
Fractional CTO · Technical Advisor
Summary
Fractional CTO and technical advisor with 10+ years of technical leadership. I help early-stage
founders set technical direction, make sound architecture decisions, and figure out where AI genuinely
belongs in their product — and I can build the first version myself. Former agency founder (grew to 15 engineers), technical co-founder multiple
times, and open-source author with ~250+ GitHub stars across the Flutter ecosystem. Equally comfortable
shipping a polished mobile app, standing up a multi-tenant SaaS backend, or running large-scale
data/scraping pipelines that become the product's moat.
Core Strengths
- Early-stage CTO leadership (Seed → Growth)
- MVP to production in weeks
- AI / LLM product integration & automation
- Large-scale scraping & data pipelines
- Scalable system architecture & CI/CD
- Founder & investor communication
- Remote-first team leadership
- Technical due diligence & advisory
Selected Products & Live Work
Neural Draft — Founder & CEO
neuraldraft.io
The backend for AI-built sites. A single API giving AI-generated apps a production backend — CMS,
blogging, social scheduling, booking, and Stripe-connected commerce — plus an MCP server so tools like
Claude Code, Cursor and v0 build against it with automatic brand consistency. Multi-tenant, multi-language,
published TypeScript SDK.
Lex Custis — Creator (open source)
lexcustis.eu · github.com/vbalagovic/lex-custis
Open-source, EU-sovereign compliance engine for the EU AI Act. Self-host it, point it at your LLM, and
it becomes the regulator's proof layer: a tamper-evident audit log (per-org HMAC-SHA256 hash chain),
one-click Annex IV dossier export, an Article 73 serious-incident workflow, PII / prompt-injection
pre-checks, and confidence / grounding / bias post-checks. Multi-tenant, multi-LLM (Mistral or
self-hosted Ollama). AGPL-3.0.
AutoValuer — Builder
autovaluer.eu
"Know what any used car is actually worth." Real-time used-car valuations computed from 266k+ live
marketplace listings across 11 European markets, refreshed 4× daily — with photo-based AI condition
checking, fair-price ranges, and price alerts.
CarsDataset API — Builder
api.carsdataset.com
The data engine behind AutoValuer, productized as a REST API: 54,000+ vehicles across 370+ brands and
110,000+ price listings, with CSV/SQL export. End-to-end scraping, normalization and data engineering at scale.
Littlemind — Builder
littlemindapp.com
A 60-second daily check-in app for parents of children 4–14; an AI companion surfaces patterns in mood,
sleep and behavior and suggests evidence-based techniques. Mobile (iOS & Android), 10 languages,
therapist-ready PDF export.
motchi.art — Builder
motchi.art
An AI character-animation engine that turns inputs into character animations through an AI-driven
pipeline — for creators and studios who want to skip manual animation work.
Experience
Founder & CEO — Neural Draft (AI infrastructure)2025 – Present
UK / Remote
- Founded and led an AI-backend platform from zero to production.
- Designed multi-tenant architecture supporting rapid onboarding and scale.
- Built LLM-based generation pipelines and an MCP server integrated into real customer workflows.
- Defined the technical roadmap and cost-aware AI usage strategy alongside monetization goals.
CTO & Co-Founder — Axerate2025 – Present
US / Remote
- Technical co-founder responsible for system architecture and execution.
- Led MVP delivery under real startup constraints (time, budget, team size).
- Stood up scalable backend/frontend foundations, CI/CD, code review, and a weekly release cadence from day one.
CTO — QED d.o.o. (Software Consultancy & Product Studio)2016 – 2025
Croatia
- Built and scaled a development company from 2 to 15 engineers.
- Acted as fractional CTO for multiple startups across mobile, web, and backend.
- Designed architectures optimized for long-term maintainability and scale; reduced time-to-market with internal tooling and reusable frameworks.
- Mentored developers and led cross-functional technical decision-making.
Co-Founder — Emploio (HR Tech)Previous
- Co-founded a recruitment-technology startup; designed core system architecture, data pipelines, and matching logic.
Technology Stack
Mobile & FrontendFlutter, Dart, Vue.js, React, TypeScript
Backend & APIsLaravel, Python, Go, Node.js, REST APIs, Microservices
AI / LLMOpenAI & Claude APIs, LLM orchestration, MCP, AI workflows, ML Kit
Data & ScrapingLarge-scale scraping pipelines, normalization, DuckDB
Cloud & DevOpsAWS, GCP, Firebase, Docker, CI/CD, Fastlane
DatabasesPostgreSQL, MySQL, DuckDB, MongoDB, Firestore
Open Source & Writing
~250+ GitHub stars across Flutter ecosystem projects — github.com/vbalagovic
- flutter-presetup — production-ready Flutter starter (flavors, Riverpod, GoRouter, localization). ~129★ / 31 forks.
- flutter_scalable_ocr — Flutter OCR package wrapping Google ML Kit with partial camera-region selection. ~81★ / 56 forks.
- cars-dataset — open vehicle-specs dataset (35,000+ variants, 370+ brands). ~16★.
- lex-custis — open-source EU AI Act compliance engine (AGPL-3.0). FastAPI + Postgres, hash-chained audit log.
Medium (220+ followers), published in ITNEXT; organizer of Zagorje DevCon. Topics: startup engineering, Flutter at scale, DevOps, AI integration.
Availability
CTO / Technical Co-Founder (early-stage)
Fractional CTO / Technical Advisor
Architecture & AI Advisory