Technical Co-Founder Partnerships · Venture Studio · Cloud Native

We don't just consult.
We invest in your success.

1337 IT Solutions is a venture studio and technical consulting firm that partners with startups and growth-stage companies through equity-for-engineering arrangements. You get enterprise-grade CTO leadership and cloud-native architecture. We get a stake in your future. Your success becomes our success—literally.

Explore a Partnership ↗How It Works

10%

Equity stakes held

We put skin in the game with every venture partner

3

Products live in market

BKwire · Caprix · RunBook Co-Pilot

40%

Faster release cadences

GitOps + AI-assisted delivery pipelines

$0

CTO salary required

Enterprise-grade leadership via equity partnership

Enterprise-grade technical leadership.
Without the $300K+ CTO salary.

Traditional consulting bills by the hour and walks away when the contract ends. We take equity stakes because we're building something together. That means we care about your architecture decisions in year three, not just the deliverable in sprint two.

What We Build

Capabilities that compound

Every engagement produces reusable assets—Terraform modules, CI/CD templates, AI workflows, component libraries—so each partnership makes the next one faster and better.

☁️

Cloud Native Architecture

Production-grade infrastructure on AWS, GCP, or Azure—designed for scale from day one, not bolted on later.

  • Kubernetes orchestration, serverless, and edge deployments
  • Multi-cloud landing zones with Terraform and policy-as-code
  • FinOps telemetry that ties infrastructure spend to business outcomes

→ Ship on infrastructure that grows with your revenue, not your headcount.

⚙️

DevOps & CI/CD Automation

Automated pipelines, developer platforms, and observability stacks that let small teams ship like large ones.

  • GitHub Actions / GitLab CI with supply-chain security baked in
  • Internal developer platforms and self-service infrastructure
  • SLO-driven observability tied to executive dashboards

→ Every engineer ships confidently. Every deploy is traceable and reversible.

🤖

AI Ops & Intelligent Automation

We embed AI into your operations—not as a demo, but as a force multiplier that closes incidents and accelerates decisions.

  • LLM-powered runbook copilots and proactive anomaly detection
  • Knowledge graphs fused with telemetry for self-diagnosing systems
  • Workflow automation that eliminates toil, not just tracks it

→ Incidents resolve before Slack wakes up the on-call engineer.

⚡

AI-Assisted Product Development

Pair senior architects with AI-assisted development to build production applications at startup speed with enterprise quality.

  • Zero-to-one SaaS builds with architecture that investors can diligence
  • AI-augmented coding workflows that 3x delivery velocity
  • Component libraries, design systems, and reusable platform modules

→ Go from idea to revenue-generating product in weeks, not quarters.

Proof of Execution

Portfolio Companies

We don't just advise—we build, own, and operate. These are companies where 1337ITS serves as technical co-founder with meaningful equity stakes and ongoing CTO leadership.

Equity Partner · CTOFinancial Risk Intelligence

BKwire ↗

BKwire is a bankruptcy monitoring and alert platform that helps businesses track when their customers file for bankruptcy. In thin-margin industries—fuel distribution, wholesale, logistics—losing even one receivable to an undetected filing can cost tens of thousands. BKwire delivers real-time alerts so companies can act immediately: adjusting credit terms, filing claims, and protecting their bottom line before it's too late.

"BKwire has been a game-changer, saving us thousands of dollars by instantly alerting us to customers who filed for bankruptcy. Before BKwire, we were blind to timely notices, leaving us vulnerable in an industry where margins are razor-thin."

What We Built

  • Real-time bankruptcy filing alerts saving clients thousands per incident
  • Multi-cloud data pipeline architecture spanning AWS and GCP
  • Compliance-ready onboarding and institutional-grade research tools
Equity Partner · CTOResearch Lab Management

Caprix ↗

Caprix is a lab management platform purpose-built for research labs and Principal Investigators scaling their programs. As labs grow, what once felt organized becomes chaos: overlapping grants, shifting timelines, and hours lost to manual tracking. Caprix gives PIs the visibility to scale their impact without scaling the administrative burden—grant tracking, resource allocation, and timeline management in one intelligent system.

What We Built

  • "Scaling Science Without Scaling Chaos" — operational clarity for growing labs
  • Grant lifecycle management from proposal through compliance reporting
  • Resource visibility that lets PIs focus on science, not spreadsheets
1337ITS ProductAI-Powered Operations

RunBook Co-Pilot

RunBook Co-Pilot is our emerging AI operations product—an intelligent system that bridges the gap between documentation and action. It transforms static runbooks into living, context-aware copilots that guide operators through incidents, automate routine procedures, and capture institutional knowledge that typically walks out the door with senior engineers.

What We Built

  • LLM-powered agents that subscribe to status pages and alert streams
  • Automatic postmortem capture and knowledge base enrichment
  • Workflow engine that turns tribal knowledge into repeatable automation

How We Work

The Equity Partnership Model

Most consulting firms optimize for billable hours. We optimize for outcomes. Our equity-for-engineering model means lower upfront costs for you and aligned long-term incentives for both sides. We're not vendors—we're partners.

01

Discovery

We start with a deep technical and business assessment—not a sales pitch. We need to understand your architecture, market position, and growth trajectory to determine if a partnership makes sense for both sides.

02

Partnership Terms

We structure an equity-for-engineering arrangement that aligns incentives. Lower upfront costs for you, long-term upside for us. Every deal is bespoke—because every company's needs and stage are different.

03

Build & Ship

We embed as your technical co-founder: architecting systems, shipping product, hiring your first engineers, and building the infrastructure that scales. This isn't staff augmentation—it's committed partnership.

04

Grow Together

Because we hold equity, we stay invested in your success long after the initial build. Ongoing CTO-level guidance, architecture reviews, and strategic technical leadership—because your growth is literally our growth.

Who This Is For

Startups

You have product-market fit but not a $300K budget for a CTO. You need someone who can architect systems, ship code, and make technical hiring decisions—with skin in the game.

Growth-Stage Companies

You're scaling from startup to mid-size and your technical foundations need to scale too. We bring the architecture and operations expertise to grow without breaking.

Non-Technical Founders

You have the domain expertise and market insight. We bring the technical co-founder capability—architecture, team building, and engineering leadership—without giving up a founder seat.

Our Story

Built different. On purpose.

1337 IT Solutions was born from a simple observation: the consulting industry is fundamentally misaligned. Traditional firms bill by the hour, which means they're incentivized to make projects take longer. They staff junior engineers at senior rates. They deliver recommendations instead of running systems. And when the contract ends, they walk away—regardless of whether what they built actually works.

We wanted to build a different kind of firm. One where we're invested—literally—in the success of what we build. Where our engineers stay because they're co-owners, not contractors. Where the measure of a good engagement isn't billable hours captured, but whether the company we partnered with is thriving two years later.

That conviction led to our equity-for-engineering model: we trade cloud-native architecture, DevOps automation, AI operations, and CTO-level leadership for meaningful ownership stakes in the companies we build with. It's a model that only works if we're genuinely good at what we do—because our upside depends entirely on our partners' success.

Our Vision

Build the premier AI-powered venture studio and technical consulting firm—where every partnership creates compounding value through shared ownership, reusable IP, and a portfolio of companies that prove our work delivers.

Our Mission

Partner with ambitious teams to build transformative technology through equity-aligned relationships. Give startups and growth companies access to the technical leadership that usually requires $500K+ in payroll—structured so both sides win.

Aligned Incentives

We take equity because we believe in what we build. When your company succeeds, we succeed. No misaligned hourly billing that rewards slow delivery.

Technical Excellence

Every system we build is designed to be acquired, scaled, or handed off cleanly. Investor-ready architecture, comprehensive documentation, and no technical debt traps.

Founder Empathy

We've built products from zero. We understand the difference between a $200k architecture astronaut recommendation and what actually needs to ship this quarter.

Sustainable Growth

We don't burn through runway building cathedrals. We ship incrementally, validate continuously, and scale infrastructure in lockstep with revenue.

Start a Conversation

Let's build together.

We take on a small number of equity partnerships per year—enough to give each the attention it deserves. If you're building something meaningful and need a technical co-founder who's in it for the long run, we should talk.

Equity partnerships, retainer engagements, and advisory arrangements all welcome. Expect a candid technical assessment and partnership proposal within 72 hours.

📧cbford@1337itsolutions.com

🌐St. Louis, Missouri · Remote-First

🎯Cloud Native · DevOps · AI Ops · Technical Co-Founder Partnerships