About Us
Andrew Ingram
Andrew Ingram is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Pluvo, where he leads engineering to build Decision Intelligence technology that transforms how businesses approach financial planning. At Pluvo, Andrew oversees the development of an AI-powered platform that empowers finance leaders at startups, mid-market companies, and enterprises with tools for automated forecasting, scenario planning, and real-time financial analysis.
Andrew's technical expertise bridges telecommunications infrastructure and modern SaaS development. Before founding Pluvo in November 2023, he spent over two years at Ciena, a global leader in networking systems, developing embedded Linux software for carrier-grade Ethernet routers and switches. As a Routing/IP Software Engineer, he implemented mission-critical telecommunications protocols. His work on Ciena's next-generation PON (Passive Optical Network) application involved building firmware for the telecommunications backbone that powers global internet infrastructure.
Andrew's approach to financial software stems from a foundation in building reliable, deterministic systems at scale. At Ford Motor Company, he optimized embedded firmware to increase efficiency, and led an initiative to strengthen software quality. At uOttawa's Department of Family Medicine, he led an agile team of 10 developers building an e-learning portal that showcased his ability to bridge backend infrastructure with user-facing applications.
Andrew holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Software Engineering from the University of Ottawa. A passionate builder beyond his professional work, he has developed two mobile games with over 10,000 total downloads.
At Pluvo, Andrew applies principles from telecommunications and embedded systems to financial planning, championing the philosophy that planning systems should preserve the reasoning behind decisions, not just track numbers. He's building technology that transforms FP&A from a quarterly ritual into a continuous, company-wide system where strategy, budgets, forecasts, and actual results flow together automatically
Topics of Expertise:
Telecommunications & Infrastructure Engineering
Network infrastructure reliability and performance
Telecommunications protocol implementation
Mission-critical systems development
Embedded Systems & Firmware Development
Embedded software development
Firmware optimization and performance tuning
Hardware-software integration
Embedded systems for telecommunications
Real-time systems programming
Low-level software architecture
Software Engineering & Quality Assurance
Test-driven development and quality systems
Agile team leadership and management
React, Redux, and Firebase development
Full-stack application architecture
Code optimization and runtime efficiency
API development and systems integration
AI & Financial Technology
Decision Intelligence platforms
AI-powered financial planning and analysis
Deterministic computation vs. LLM limitations
Context-aware AI systems for finance
Automated financial forecasting
Real-time scenario planning technology
AI agents for financial workflows
SaaS Platform Development
Web-native application architecture
Cloud-native financial planning systems
Multi-tenant SaaS design
Platform scalability and reliability
Cross-functional product development
Building for mid-market and enterprise
Startup & Technical Leadership
CTO responsibilities in early-stage startups
Engineering team building and management
Product-engineering collaboration
Technical decision-making and architecture
Scaling engineering organizations
"Eating your own dog food" product philosophy
Telecommunications to FinTech Journey
"Why telecommunications engineers make better fintech CTOs" - How carrier-grade reliability principles apply to financial systems where accuracy is non-negotiable
"From internet backbone to financial backbone" - Applying lessons from building PON infrastructure to creating financial planning systems
"The deterministic approach to financial software" - Why building Ciena routers taught valuable lessons about handling mission-critical financial data
"Testing at scale: From 500 unit tests at Ford to testing financial workflows" - Quality assurance principles that translate from automotive firmware to financial platforms
AI in Finance (Technical Perspective)
"Why LLMs can't do math (and what to do about it)" - The fundamental limitations of language models in financial computation and how to architect around them
"Computation vs. conversation: Building AI that actually works for finance" - The difference between chatbots that sound good and systems that calculate correctly
"Context over tokens: Making AI useful for CFOs" - How financial planning requires structured reasoning, not just natural language processing
"The AI that finance leaders can trust" - Technical approaches to making AI transparent, auditable, and deterministic for financial planning
Engineering Leadership & Product Philosophy
"Building for the future of finance, not today's workflows" - The decision to stop building around how finance teams work today and start building for how they want to work tomorrow
"When your CFO uses the product you build" - The benefits and challenges of internal adoption as product validation
"From 10-person agile teams to engineering a startup" - Lessons in technical leadership from uOttawa to Pluvo
"Eating your own dog food: Running Pluvo on Pluvo" - How internal usage drives better product decisions and faster iteration
Technical Architecture & System Design
"Building financial systems that don't break" - Applying embedded systems reliability principles to SaaS financial planning
"Real-time financial modeling: The infrastructure challenge" - Technical architecture required for instant scenario planning and live data updates
"Why financial planning needs a nervous system, not just a database" - How Pluvo's system of judgment differs from traditional systems of record
"From React dashboards to decision engines" - The evolution from displaying data to orchestrating financial workflows
Industry Transformation & Future of Work
"The fourth generation of fintech" - Why Decision Intelligence platforms represent a fundamental shift from infrastructure, consumer, and enterprise finance
"When spreadsheets become legacy systems" - The technical debt of Excel-based planning and why it's harder to replace than most people think
"Autonomous finance is being built right now" - The trajectory from manual spreadsheets to AI-powered autonomous financial systems
"Mid-market companies getting Fortune 500 capabilities" - How modern platforms democratize sophisticated planning tools
Ottawa Tech Ecosystem & Canadian Innovation
"Building global fintech from Canada's capital" - The advantages and challenges of building a startup in Ottawa
"From University of Ottawa to SaaS founder" - The journey from software engineering student to CTO
"Canadian engineering talent competing globally" - Why Ottawa produces world-class technical talent in telecommunications and software
Our Team
