Strategy and Vision, Technical Assessments
Meet your strategic objectives. We review, research, define, and execute your product and technology roadmap. Our team analyses and assesses your technological competencies and capabilities to ensure that your strategic objectives are achieved and all stakeholder requirements are met or exceeded.
People and Teams
Achieve your vision by having the right people in the right roles. Our cultural transformation services create highly engaged teams who are motivated to succeed, who can grow both personally and professionally, and who perform at their peak potential. We have an outstanding track record of building and scaling high performance teams while increasing retention.
Executive Development
Enhance or augment your leadership team. The Key CTO team coaches, mentors, and develops the skills of your CTO, CIO, VP Engineering, and/or Chief Architect. We enable your chief technologist to enhance their leadership and communication skills and give them the tools to improve their effectiveness and productivity - ultimately becoming a more effective member of your executive team.
Transition Planning
Ensure a smooth transition. The Key CTO team executes organizational and structural changes to elevate your organization to the next level of performance. We refactor underperforming aspects of Development, QA, IT, and Operations while helping identify and on-board a high quality permanent CIO or CTO. We define and implement the transition plan for your chief technologist, including vetting candidates.
Processes, Tools, and DevOps
Eliminate ambiguity. Key CTO transforms your organization to increase release velocity, improve the quality of deliverables, create and enhance safe visibility into production for dev and QA teams, create transparency for non-technical staff into the technical organization, and promote end-to-end responsibility and shared ownership for all aspects of service delivery.
Security, Compliance, and Disaster Recovery
Understand and mitigate risk. We develop and implement organization-wide policies and processes for information security and privacy as well as Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning. We shorten your sales cycle, mitigate risks, and provide assurance in the context of technical due diligence. We provide a variety of compliance solutions for such cases as PCI.
Data, Machine Learning, and AI
Launch AI-powered products. Our team and partners support your end-to-end data and AI needs: from education, strategy, and roadmapping to custom development, launch, and ongoing coaching. We get you started the right way, accelerate time-to-market, share best practices for AI product building, and develop a strong in-house data competency. From data engineering to data science to deep learning, we can also provide experienced talent to help you meet your delivery goals.
Why Choose Key CTO
While successfully scaling and leading product and technology teams of 5–170 people from the ground up, our C-level team has repeatedly created sustainable cultures which attract, develop, and retain high-performing technical talent.
We’ve delivered mission critical, highly available, highly scalable, reliable, and secure products (B2B, B2C, SaaS, enterprise, web, mobile) widely used by the world’s largest brands, including more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies.
As chief technologists, we’ve provided technical leadership to 5–500 person organizations, scaling revenues to over $60MM (USD).
Our CTOs are named inventors on 70+ patents and pending patents worldwide and have been involved in the pursuit and enforcement of various intellectual property rights.
Our CTOs have led multiple companies through M&As and IPOs as high as $170MM (USD), along with raising millions (USD) in capital, and obtaining an aggregate of over $10MM (CAD) in grants and tax credits.
Contact UsKey CTO Results
Patents
0Revenue Scaled To
0 MM (USD)Largest Team Led
0Highest IPO
0MM (USD)Leadership Team
Bohdan Zabawskyj
CTO
Bohdan Zabawskyj is the CTO at Mercatus Inc. where he has overall responsibility for the Engineering, QA, IT, and DevOps teams. Prior to Mercatus, Bohdan was the CTO at Rypple where he was responsible for evolving Rypple’s SaaS based performance management solution to meet the needs of a rapidly growing client base which included Facebook, LinkedIn, & Spotify. Previously, Bohdan was the CTO at Redknee were he contributed to Redknee's growth from a start-up to a publicly traded and profitable entity with clients in over 60 countries over a 10 year period.
Bohdan is very active in the startup community as an Advisor to a number of compelling companies including Kik, Staff, ParkBench, and DevBBQ – and as a Meetup Organizer (Toronto CTO Group & Ionic Toronto). Bohdan is a named inventor in over 50 patents and pending patent applications world-wide. Bohdan has B.A.Sc. & M.Eng degrees in Electrical Engineering and a MBA in IT Management.
Erik Levinson
CTO
Erik Levinson is a senior technology leader who's passionate about delivering high-quality software.
Erik's career spans over a decade of diverse roles in support, QA, operations, development, infrastructure, and technical leadership in B2B, B2C, and public sector organizations.
As the CTO of Uberflip, Erik built and led a dev/QA/ops team responsible for delivering a highly-available, secure, and highly-scalable SaaS platform serving such enterprise customers as HP, Cisco, UPS, Deloitte, SAP, Oracle, PwC, JP Morgan Chase, and others.
Erik is the co-founder and former CTO of a Canadian regional telecom company, where he developed and commercialized innovative technologies.
Erik is also highly active in Toronto's tech community, including co-organizing the Toronto CTO Group and the DevOps TO meetups as well as DevOps Days Toronto.
Erik has a BCS degree from the University of Waterloo.
Chris Ellefson
CTO
Chris Ellefson started his career over 20 years ago as a software developer and has lead technology teams at a number of early stage startups across such industries as health care, media, food delivery, marketing, legal, and machine learning.
He has provided technology strategy, built DevOps teams, implemented security procedures and secured funding and SR&ED. In recent years, Chris has also guided SOC2 security certification for clients.
At Key CTO, Chris has provided CTO services for clients including Upline, Orderful, Stan AI, Second Closet, and Key Living.
Chris provides mentorship in the startup community through Startup Boost and Futurepreneur Canada. He earned his BSc in Math with Computer Science from MIT and a MSc in Computer Science from UBC.
Andrew Potapov
CTO
Andrew Potapov has been in the tech industry for over 15 years both as a software developer and a leader. He started his career in Silicon Valley and has 2 successful IPOs under his belt. Andrew has worked at a variety of companies from early stage startups to well established corporations. His past experience has been in FinTech, AdTech, mobile gaming, food and ecommerce.
Andrew's passions are in building and scaling efficient engineering teams as well as driving the product roadmap and its execution. He has advised a number of companies and founders.
Andrew is passionate about mentorship of both developers and young leaders to grow in their careers. He speaks fequently at University Of Toronto Computer Science lectures.
Andrew has a BSc in Computer Science from University of Toronto with a minor in Economics.
Edmond Lau
CTO
For over two decades, Edmond Lau has been driving software development, architecture, technology roadmaps, product strategies, and leading multiple large software development organizations.
Edmond has worked at a variety of companies from early-stage startups to Fortune 100, across verticals such as Enterprise SaaS, Logistics, eSports, Internet of Things, Media Publishing, Marketing, Cryptocurrencies, Customer Relationship Management, and FinTech.
Edmond has served as the CTO of a startup that was acquired by Canada’s largest cinema chain. He also carried a pre-seed startup growing it through Series A.
Edmond is passionate about mentoring the next generation of software architects and technology leaders. He is currently an engineering mentor at Plato.
Edmond has a BSc. double major in Computer Science and Mathematics with a minor in Physics from Wilfrid Laurier University. He is also a certified TOGAF Enterprise Architect.