For vertical SaaS teams shifting to AI-native engineering — and the investors backing them
We saw the AI wave coming and built the framework for it — while everyone else was still keeping up. Teams using it ship six-to-eight-week features in four days.
Pilots from $12,500 · Two-week rollouts from $50K
Jason Vertrees, PhD
Founder & Principal CTO · Heavy Chain Engineering
Ex-CTO · $1B AUM firm · 20 years building · Team expanding 2026
85%
Faster feature velocity in top engagements — six-to-eight-week projects shipped in days.
The agentic engineering shift
Your competitors aren't hiring more engineers. They're building more with fewer.
Book a Strategy CallThe Technical Valuation Gap
18–24
months behind.
That's how far behind the average lower-to-mid-market vertical SaaS team is on AI adoption — and competitors compound the advantage every quarter.
Closing that gap is what separates the teams that turn AI into revenue from the teams that watch it pass. Heavy Chain exists to close that gap — for the team itself, and for the investors backing them. Two altitudes, one operating rhythm.
What you can buy from us
A value ladder — from a one-week pilot to a fund-level portfolio engagement. Each rung installs the same disciplines: our agent harness, agentic engineering practice, and a measurable production outcome.
The ongoing engagement
Embedded technical leadership on retainer — strategy and delivery, not advice. Two face-to-face meetings a week plus twenty additional hours of async work a month. We sit in code review, sprint planning, Slack, and board prep so your team ships instead of spins.
Growth-stage
From $12,500 / mo
Single company, no permanent CTO
Portfolio
From $18,500 / mo
Adds GP / board reporting + fund alignment
Currently embedded across a portfolio of lower-to-mid-market vertical SaaS companies. Two altitudes of leverage, one operating rhythm.
Click to read in detail →
Not sure where to start? The first call maps where you are and which rung of the ladder moves the needle fastest.
Book a Strategy CallThe framework that ships with us
Most AI tooling assumes the model is the bottleneck. It isn't. The bottleneck is what the model is allowed to do.
ETC encodes how a senior product engineering team works as hooks, agents, and skills your AI tools must operate inside. Install it once. The same disciplines govern your team's work from then on.
Discipline > capability. The model is smart enough already.
A Socratic interview refines requirements until they're buildable — and refuses to draft from vague input.
A pre-edit hook blocks production code without a sibling test. No exemption flag. Tests are the specification.
Every task is scored on the WBS scale and recurses until each leaf is small enough for one agent session.
A spec-enforcer agent reviews every shipped task against the original PRD before the release tag is written.
Each feature carries a value hypothesis. The harness reports the percentage that held — broken down by author role.
When a bug escapes, the fix is layered at three independent gates. Three must fail simultaneously for recurrence.
Forward-Deployed AI Rollout
Five phases over two weeks. We share the desktop the whole time — your team learns by shipping a real project, not by watching a demo.
01
We open with a working session on agentic engineering — spec-driven development, agent harnesses, and the disciplines your team will operate inside. The vocabulary lands first so the tooling lands on something.
02
We fork ETC into your GitHub repository — or your whole organization. The harness lives in your infrastructure from day one. Nothing about the deployment is opaque or external; you own it when we leave.
03
Together we choose the deliverable — a real feature from your roadmap, not a toy demo. We scope it, define what “done” means, and write the spec the build runs against. The work has to matter, or the lesson doesn't stick.
04
We sit and build the chosen feature together, sharing the desktop, while your team learns by shipping. What comes out is production-grade work you were going to need anyway — built the agentic way, in days instead of weeks.
05
Worst case: a feature shipped better and faster than your team would have built alone. Best case: the team has learned enough to act as internal champions, carrying agentic engineering into the rest of the organization on their own.
The fixed terms
Two weeks · shared desktop · ETC installed in your org · one production project shipped.
Run the numbers
Move the sliders. The math is conservative. The fee is fixed.
50% is the conservative default. Actual engagements have reached 85%+ — six-to-eight-week features shipping in four days.
Estimated annual value unlocked
$1,000,000
Value unlocked is output capacity, not headcount reduction — a team shipping faster ships more. Pricing shown is the Rollout base tier; larger teams use the full tier at $100K. Pilots start at $12,500.
What leaders report back
Results from teams that crossed to the other side.
“Jason's influence has been transformative. He rebuilt the way our team thinks and executes—unifying the tech stack, embedding AI across the product, and raising the bar for everyone involved.”
Paul Laursen
Co-Founder, Athletica & HIIT Science
Unified stack · AI embedded across the product
“Jason brought investment in leadership, built our materials from scratch, kept every stakeholder in the loop, and elevated how we communicate across the company.”
Managing Partner
Private equity portfolio retrospective
3x delivery velocity
“Your technical expertise and vision has been so helpful along the way.”
“I highly value you as a person and professional. I hope you don’t mind if I consider you a mentor—I never really understood what that word meant until I started working with you.”
Senior Engineer
Data scientist, PhD in Theoretical Physics
Validated compliance workflows
“Shout out to Jason Vertrees for all the help.”
“I couldn’t have done it without Jason Vertrees and his incredible team at Heavy Chain Engineering, LLC. The fact that we launched a fully rebuilt site in a matter of weeks is still insane to me!”
Next step
30 minutes. We'll assess where your team sits in the agentic engineering shift, identify the highest-leverage move, and decide if there's a fit.
Response time
Within 1–2 business days
Who it's for
CEOs, CTOs, VPs of Engineering, PE operators
How to reach us
Share context in the form — a real person will reply, not a sales rep
