At CTO (Boardroom Media) we track over 1,000,000 startups and over 5,000,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top Cologne based CTO’ operating in the Software space. If you think a CTO’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on [email protected].
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Hui Cao
Network CTO, Western Europe of Huawei Technologies
Hui Cao has over 15 years experiences in the Telecommunications industry ranging from the operator, academic research to the vendor. He and his team focus on innovative technologies and solutions for broadband development in Western European countries.
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About Huawei Technologies: Huawei Technologies provides infrastructure application software and devices with wireline, wireless, and IP technologies.

Wladimir Palant
Founder and CTO of Adblock Plus
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About Adblock Plus, eyeo: Adblock Plus is a free extension that allows you to block annoying ads and disable tracking in all major browsers.
Henrik Basten
Founder & CTO of Weflow
Henrik Basten is the Founder and CTO at Weflow.
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About Exactag, Weflow: Weflow is a Salesforce productivity platform helps AEs save time, structure their day & win more deals.
Steffen Kirchhoff
Co-Founder and CTO of Taxy.io
Steffen researches and develops the artificial intelligence behind Taxy.io. As a computer scientist with a penchant for Python, he was previously a data scientist and researcher at Harvard.
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About Taxy.io: Taxy.io builds digital assistants for tax advisers to support their daily research and client advisory.

Timo Derstappen
Co-Founder and CTO of Giant Swarm
Loves to create, hack, make. Linux user, sports addict, orchestrating my distributed, scalable life. Co-Founder at Giant Swarm.
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About Giant Swarm: Giant Swarm is to give everyone the power and freedom to build modern software that runs their world.

Rui Frazao
CTO & EVP EMEA Operations of B-Yond
Rui Frazao is CTO of Vasona Networks. He previously spent nearly 15 years with Vodafone (London: VOD) where he was most recently director of network engineering responsible for efforts across Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Key projects included VoLTE deployments and launching the first virtualized network core in Europe. Rui previously did engineering work with Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), payment network SIBS and the Lisbon Stock Exchange.
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About B-Yond: B-Yond is an AI-based startup that develops network automation solutions.
Marius Gerdan
Founder & Chief Technology Officer of rankingCoach
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About Novelty Media, rankingCoach: The complete digital marketing application for small businesses
Martin Trzaskalik
CTO of cleverbridge
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About cleverbridge: Cleverbridge is an ecommerce and subscription billing solution for monetizing software, SaaS, and digital goods.
Eduard Frank
CTO of Scanbot
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About Scanbot: Scanbot is a German B2B start-up that offers modern scanner SDKs to capture documents, barcodes, ID-documents and more.

Phillip Ghadir
CTO and Board Member of innoQ
Phillip Ghadir has over 15 years of experience in the IT from various industries. His main interest is the design of software systems – in particular architectures for mission-critical, distributed systems. He is CTO and Board Member of innoQ and as such responsible for the cross-project organization innoQ. Phillip is a founding member of the personal iSAQB eV and is actively working on the design of the curriculum for the CPSA-F (Certified Professional for Software Architecture, Foundation Level) and the CPSA-A (Certified Professional for Software Architecture, Advanced Level) with. He speaks also regularly at industry conferences such as the JAX and has written numerous magazine articles.
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About innoQ: innoQ is an information technology consultancy that provides software architecture consulting, development, and training services.
Dr. Yury V. Zaytsev
Chief Technology Officer of moneymeets
Dr. Yury V. Zaytsev is the Chief Technology Officer at moneymeets GmbH.
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About moneymeets: Moneymeets is a developer of a customer-centered consulting software for banks and insurance companies.
Frank Muenchmeyer
Chief Technology Officer of tradingtwins
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About tradingtwins: Simple B2B purchases

Thorsten Rood
Principal Architect, Regional Director, and CTO of Braincon
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About Braincon: Braincon engaging in the provision of powerful and secure application infrastructures and consideration of the modern workplace.
Thomas Trzaska
CTO of Present4D
Since 2003 design and development of multimedia 360 degree walkthroughs and interactive applications. Profound experience in the field of 360 degree construction documentation and trade fair business. Since 2013 expert for the development of virtual reality software.
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About Present4D: Present4D is a specialist developer of virtual reality software with many years of experience in the project and consulting business.