Øystein Ellingbø | CTO, Ardoq | Top 30 EMEA CTOs 2026

Career History

Øystein Ellingbø has been a pivotal figure at Ardoq for more than a decade. As CTO, he is responsible for the strategic direction and execution across the engineering teams. Under his leadership, Ardoq's platform has developed to be a world leader in Enterprise Architecture and the main driver of AI innovation in their space. He has driven the shift toward a highly automated, AI-driven SDLC, consistently raising both velocity and quality while ensuring world-class availability and hosting efficiency. These achievements solidify his reputation as a trailblazer within the EMEA CTO B2B SaaS community.

Before Ardoq, Ellingbø built a decade of experience as a consultant, working with large and complex clients on software development and architecture. He holds an MSc in Computer Science.

About Ardoq

Founded in 2013 by Erik Bakstad (CEO) and Magnulf Pilskog and headquartered in Oslo, Norway, Ardoq is one of the world’s leading vendors of cloud-native Enterprise Architecture software, with a truly global customer base and top tier clients such as Carlsberg, Condé Nast and the United States’ Federal Communications Commission. Ardoq’s software platform is the engine for driving digital business execution, which supports how customers’ business can transform in a world of increasing IT complexity, cloud migration, and the proliferation of applications. Ardoq has been named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools for five consecutive years (2021-2025), highlighting its standing among global peers.

The company has expanded to around 300 employees, with offices in Oslo, Copenhagen, London and New York. To date it has raised around $163m in funding, including a $125m Series D round in 2022 led by EQT Growth and One Peak.