Martell Ventures brings together technology leadership and business strategy — so we solve the right problems, not just the obvious ones.
Martell Ventures provides fractional CTO services, architecture leadership, technical due diligence, and engineering execution for startups and growth-stage organizations.
We work with founders, CEOs, and boards who need senior technical leadership — not a team of developers with a project manager. Our engagements are designed to be long-term partnerships, not one-off deliveries. The companies we work with best are the ones that understand that technology is a strategic asset and want to treat it that way.
Our clients have built platforms that have raised $873 million in crowdfunding, scaled to serve communities in more than 100 countries, and operated at the intersection of fintech, civic technology, healthcare, education, and sustainable commerce. We've been with them through growth spurts, architectural crises, team rebuilds, and pivots. That's what a real technical partner looks like.
Founder & Principal Architect
Ryan has more than 30 years of hands-on engineering experience building commercial platforms across crowdfunding, fintech, healthcare, education, mobile, and e-commerce. He holds a double degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Duke University.
His career began in AAA game development at Bungie, where he worked on Marathon and Myth: The Fallen Lords — platforms where technical decisions had to be right the first time and performance was non-negotiable. That discipline has informed every system he's built since.
Ryan founded Martell Ventures to provide the kind of senior technical leadership that most startups cannot afford full-time but cannot afford to go without. He believes that clients don't buy software — they buy outcomes. His work is measured in platforms scaled, organizations strengthened, and problems solved.
Strategy & Business Leadership
Bob brings 35 years of experience in business startups, private equity, organizational strategy, and financial and legal structures. He holds a BBA in Accounting and a law degree from the University of Michigan.
Bob's role in every engagement is to ensure that the business problem is fully understood before a single line of code is written — a discipline that consistently prevents the most expensive kind of technical mistake: building the wrong thing. The questions he asks in a discovery session have saved clients from months of misdirected engineering work.
His background in business ecosystems and organizational strategy means our clients get technology recommendations grounded in business reality. Technology that doesn't serve the business is just expensive complexity.
We don't measure success in commits or lines of code. We measure it in fundraising volume processed, users served, and businesses that scaled. $873 million raised on LaunchGood is a metric. Everything else is implementation detail.
Every engagement starts with deep listening. The most expensive engineering mistake is building the right solution to the wrong problem. Bob Weins exists on this team precisely because technology decisions without business grounding are just expensive guesses.
Our best client relationships are measured in years. We build systems — and organizations — designed to last. We're most valuable to clients who want a consistent senior technical voice, not a team that ships a project and disappears.
Thirty years across industries means we've seen the patterns that repeat — and the ones that don't.
Every engagement starts with a conversation. Tell us what you're facing — we'll tell you honestly what we can do about it.
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