Luca Bernardino

WORK HISTORY

SKILLS

ABOUT LUCA BERNARDINO

Scaling a technology team is one of the hardest things a founder does. You need someone senior enough to make the right architectural decisions and build the right team, but hiring a full-time CTO at the wrong stage can burn runway and slow you down. That\'s the problem I solve.I was employee #3 at Plann. Over five years I built the engineering function from scratch, grew the team to 50 across six countries. That journey ended with an acquisition by Linktree, where I personally led the technology due diligence. They retained me post-acquisition to head their Grow Engineering division, where I\'m now building agentic AI features and monetisation capabilities for one of the world\'s most-used link-in-bio platforms.Before Plann, I architected a global booking platform at Bestjet handling searches per hour. I\'ve built AI churn prediction models with 92% accuracy, cut cloud costs in half, and shipped products that moved revenue lines. I also teach AI strategy to CEOs and senior leaders at the Institute of Directors in London, because the founders I work best with want someone who can translate what\'s technically possible into what\'s commercially smart.Today, through my consultancy Confyd, I work as a fractional CTO with seed and Series A founders. I embed with teams, ship alongside them, and help them build the technical foundations that let them move fast now without creating problems when investors start looking under the hood. Most startup pain doesn\'t originate in the codebase. It starts in the conversation where a technical decision got made without the right person at the table.My job is to be in the room for those moments.