Context
Jaden Data GmbH was co-founded in 2021 as a bootstrapped company delivering AI and distributed-systems work for regulated enterprises. I served as CTO until June 2024 and remain its fractional CTO and consulting partner.
Business problem
Enterprises wanted AI embedded in real back-office workflows, with security, data sovereignty and auditability they could defend to their own auditors. Delivering that as one-off projects does not scale; a small company needs a platform and an operating model that make every deployment cheaper than the last.
My mandate
I owned the technology strategy and product roadmap, the architecture of the platform and of client-specific systems, the technical budget (cloud, third-party APIs, resourcing), security and compliance, technical pre-sales and kick-offs, executive reporting to clients and shareholders, and the engineering organisation from the first hire onwards.
Decisions
- Bootstrap on delivery and shape the platform around paying workflows rather than a speculative product roadmap.
- One multi-tenant, event-driven platform on AWS (Lambda, ECS/Fargate, SNS/SQS) with a provider-independent model layer (OpenAI, Azure, AWS Bedrock, Google Gemini, Mistral) and role-based access control, so model choice could follow quality, latency, cost and data-sovereignty needs per client.
- Certification as an engineering programme: security controls, evidence collection and process changes run alongside delivery, reaching ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 in about three months.
- Standards before headcount: code-review rules, CI/CD quality gates and testing requirements were in place before the team grew, so quality did not depend on any one person.
Delivery
Engineering grew from 0 to 10 across frontend, backend and AI workstreams, with structured code review, pair programming and internal knowledge sharing. I led the redesign of an entangled frontend monolith into micro-frontends to give teams deployment independence. The platform reached more than 1,000 concurrent connections and thousands of requests per second with 99.9% uptime.
- 2021 — Bootstrapped start (no external capital)
- Platform — One multi-tenant system (instead of a stack per client)
- ~3 months — ISO 27001 and SOC 2 (without freezing the roadmap)
- June 2024 — Handover as CTO (consulting partner since)
Outcome
A profitable, bootstrapped company with €1M+ annual revenue, a ten-person engineering team, two certifications and 50+ organisations on the platform.
A profitable, bootstrapped company with €1M+ annual revenue, a ten-person engineering team, two certifications and 50+ organisations on the platform.
Reuse
The platform primitives, the Testbed evaluation framework and Prompt Wizard came out of repeated client needs and were reused across every later deployment; the delivery standards became the company’s operating model.
Evidence
Revenue, team size, client count, uptime and certification timeline are company records. See the related deployments for what the platform delivered in production.