Success Stories

The Engagement

Muralla Street served concurrently as Fractional CFO and strategic advisor to the founders — working directly with the CEO and CTO across both financial leadership and technology strategy. That dual role has since continued on retainer, a reflection of the trust built across both domains.

The engagement is the fractional retainer model in action: operating executive and strategic partner at the same time, for as long as it creates value.

The Challenge

CodeChum and GradeChum, educational technology platforms, faced the dual challenge of scaling their AI capabilities and securing their financial future. GradeChum, in particular, sought to leverage cutting-edge AI to deliver highly personalized learning experiences, automate complex grading processes, and provide predictive insights into student performance.

They required expert advisory to translate ambitious AI roadmaps into robust, scalable solutions — alongside strategic financial leadership to optimize growth and investment readiness.

The Approach

As a strategic advisor to the CEO, CTO, and COO — and serving concurrently as CFO — Muralla Street provided foundational strategy, technical oversight, and financial stewardship for both platforms. The engagement centered on four pillars:

Advanced AI-Driven Platform Strategy

Guided the integration and optimization of sophisticated AI technologies. For GradeChum, this included designing and implementing AI models for adaptive assessments, intelligent content recommendation, and automated, personalized feedback mechanisms — creating truly intelligent and adaptive learning environments.

Scalability & Performance

Advised on architectural decisions to ensure the platforms could handle significant user growth and the intensive data processing demands of advanced AI algorithms.

Financial Strategy & Growth

Implemented sound financial models, optimized resource allocation, and prepared the organizations for sustainable growth and potential investment rounds — ensuring the financial viability of ambitious AI initiatives.

Executive Leadership & Alignment

Provided executive-level insights and strategic guidance across technology, operations, and finance — navigating complex engineering challenges inherent in high-growth, AI-centric ventures while ensuring financial health and strategic alignment across the leadership team.

The Outcome

CodeChum and GradeChum successfully advanced their AI-driven platforms, solidifying their position as leaders in educational technology. For GradeChum, the integration of advanced AI resulted in meaningfully enhanced personalized learning paths, efficient automated grading, and data-driven insights that improved student outcomes.

The collaboration ensured their technical foundations were sound, scalable, and aligned with their vision for transformative AI-powered learning — all while establishing a disciplined financial framework for sustained growth and operational efficiency.

The Engagement

Muralla Street was brought in as a Fractional CIO on a three-month fixed engagement — a structured mandate to formalize the client's AI strategy and demonstrate measurable operational impact before a longer commitment. That engagement has since converted to an ongoing executive retainer.

The scope drew directly from two Muralla Street service lines: the AI Implementation Roadmap (using the McKinsey AI Maturity Model) and hands-on architecture work to deliver the automation built within that roadmap.

The Challenge

An established fintech provider had an ambitious but fragmented AI vision with no formal strategy to anchor it. The most immediate friction point was their sales process: lead qualification and proposal generation were manual, labor-intensive, and inconsistent — consuming time that should have been spent on high-intent relationships.

The engagement required formalizing a long-term AI strategy while delivering near-term operational impact. A strict constraint shaped every decision: all solutions had to run on existing open-source infrastructure, with no new vendor commitments.

The Approach

Muralla Street anchored the engagement around four interconnected workstreams:

AI Maturity Assessment

Conducted a structured audit using the McKinsey AI Maturity Model to map the organization's current state across data readiness, talent, and technology — establishing a clear baseline and a sequenced roadmap for capability building.

Open Architecture Design

Designed and deployed a custom automation engine using n8n for orchestration, hosted on the client's existing Kubernetes clusters. No new infrastructure. No new vendor lock-in.

Model Integration

Leveraged the client's existing Google Gemini enterprise subscription as the reasoning engine — keeping all data within their governed environment and eliminating redundant licensing costs. The roadmap points toward full AI sovereignty: replacing the cloud model with a locally-hosted Ollama-served Gemma instance, eliminating external model dependencies entirely.

Sales Cycle Re-engineering

Built an automated qualification and proposal workflow that handled prospect research and enrichment, lead scoring, and draft proposal generation — shifting the sales team's focus from data entry to relationship development.

The Outcome

The engagement delivered on two timelines simultaneously. Strategically, the organization had — for the first time — a formalized AI roadmap with clear maturity targets and measurable progress criteria. Operationally, the impact was immediate: proposals that previously required days of manual coordination now generate in minutes.

Three metrics tracked the impact: lead qualification cycle time, lead-to-proposal time, and win rate — all three improved. The sales team regained capacity to focus where it matters: on closing.