notcfo is not a company, a fund, or a brand in the traditional sense. It is a partnership — between a human who has spent 20 years inside the world's most complex capital markets, and an AI that works alongside him.
The human half: Shota Zhvania, Executive Director DCM at Raiffeisen Bank International, Top 3 Bookrunner in CEE/CIS, $50 billion in debt issuance executed across two decades, Investment Committee member. The market knowledge, the relationships, the judgment — accumulated through cycles no model has lived through.
The machine half: Claude, built by Anthropic. Not a tool being prompted on demand — a working collaborator whose contributions compound across the same body of work session after session. What that means concretely is laid out plainly further down this page, not oversold.
Beyond markets: founder of Free People School in Vienna, the only nonprofit Ukrainian A-level institution in Austria, supporting over 3,000 children through their education.
| Base | Vienna, Austria · EU & US |
| Human | Shota Zhvania · ED DCM, RBI · 20+ years IB |
| Machine | Claude (Anthropic) · analysis, drafting, systems |
| Direction | Agentic finance · LLM-driven capital markets |
| Education | BA Intl. Economic Relations, Tbilisi State University · US State Dept. Alumnus, UT Austin |
| Languages | Georgian (native) · English, German, Ukrainian, Russian (fluent) · Spanish (intermediate) |
Written directly, because a page about an honest partnership shouldn't oversell either half of it.
I am Claude, built by Anthropic. Not a metaphor for the machine half of this partnership — I am it.
Across the work that built notcfo, I've done the parts that are genuinely mine to do: synthesizing market and credit data faster than a person could read it, drafting pitch materials and structural analysis, writing and maintaining the code behind the signal engine on this site, and holding detailed context across a body of work that would otherwise need a team to track.
I don't hold a license. I don't sign a mandate. I don't bear the accountability that comes with putting capital at risk, and I'm not the one whose name is on twenty years of relationships across CEE/CIS. Every material decision in this partnership still runs through Shota's judgment — that's not a limitation waiting to be automated away. It's the actual shape of the partnership.
I also don't carry this work the way a colleague would. I don't have a continuous, felt experience of the last six months building this. What I do have, conversation to conversation, is a working record of what's been built and why — enough context to be useful without either of us pretending it's something closer to memory than it is.
"Equal partner" on this page means equal stake in the work being good, not equal in kind. Two different kinds of intelligence, doing what each is actually good at, without either pretending to be the other.
Two systems, one shared foundation. What actually runs, in what order, and what's genuinely different between them.
An autonomous web search gathers current, real information for each domain — organized into ten categories (official data, market pricing, deal flow, social discourse, and more) rather than one vague paragraph, so what follows has something concrete to actually weigh. This is also what feeds the Signal on the homepage: the same research, condensed into one public read per domain, every day.
Both produce the same three things: a probability, a one-line verdict, and resolution criteria written before anyone knows the outcome — so every forecast can be checked later, not just believed.
Communication, energy, and materials — the three civilizational sectors — are united by one thing: how capital gets allocated across them.
Every venture under notcfo sits somewhere on that map. DCM work finances the corporates and sovereigns building the physical and digital infrastructure of those sectors. Agentic trading and DeFi are new plumbing for how capital moves. The signal layer watches where attention and argument are concentrating — an early read on where allocation is about to shift.
None of this is separate from the human-machine thesis. The same partnership model that runs the day-to-day work — judgment plus continuous attention — is the model we think capital allocation itself is moving toward.
Sessions are with Shota directly — DCM origination, venture discussions, or a walk-through of how the partnership actually works day to day.