Fixed scope. Fixed price. Fixed deadline.
The kickoff call locks every variable. If we miss the delivery date, the engagement is on us, not on you.
In writing on every engagement
Greater Bear delivers operator-grade technical, AI, and data due diligence for the funds underwriting tomorrow’s category leaders. Operator-led, Investor-tested, and AI-accelerated.
A typical seed-to-Series-A deck mentions “AI” sixteen times. The actual technical asset is often a thin wrapper over a third-party API, with no proprietary data, no defensible moat, and gross margins that quietly collapse the moment usage scales.
Most funds we work with don’t have an in-house CTO. Their analysts are sharp, but they’re not the right people to take apart an inference pipeline, evaluate model quality, or read a vendor’s terms-of-service for training-data risk.
The result: capital deployed against narrative, not architecture. By the time the truth surfaces, usually mid-Series B due diligence, the next round has already priced it in.
A standardized, three-pillar assessment that gives your IC a clear verdict, Invest, Pass, or Conditional, and the questions that matter for management before the term sheet goes out.
For portfolio companies between technical hires or scale-ups that need executive-grade engineering judgment without the $400K comp package.
When the strategy is clear but the execution path isn’t. Architecture decisions, unit economics modelling, vendor evaluation, and the awkward questions you don’t want to ask your engineering lead.
Every Greater Bear assessment passes through the same proprietary framework. Every finding is rated Strong, Adequate, Weak, or Critical Concern, with evidence, not opinion.
The bones of the company. Architecture, scalability, and the gap between what was demoed and what runs in production.
What the “AI” actually is. Where the model lives, who owns it, and what happens to gross margin when usage 10×.
The defensibility question. Whether the data is genuinely proprietary, whether the flywheel exists, and whether regulators will let it keep spinning.
Big-4 tech DD typically runs €40K to €80K over four to six weeks. Greater Bear’s engagement model is built for materially less time and materially less money, with the same operator-grade rigor.
Most tech DD is run by analysts working off a checklist. We run it the way the CIO of the acquirer would run it, because that’s the seat we sit in.
We’ve built and run the systems we’re assessing. We know what good looks like from the inside, not from a checklist.
We co-invest with a VC fund evaluating pre-seed to Series A. We understand both sides of the table, what gets you to yes, and what should keep you up at night.
Our proprietary assessment framework is powered by AI agents that can read codebases, parse architecture, and surface anomalies. Days, not weeks.
No platform partnerships. No referral fees. Full NDA compliance. If a conflict exists, we flag it before the engagement starts.
An AI-driven operating platform managing €10B in assets at a global private equity firm. €40M of projected annual EBITDA from an AI-led transformation he leads today at a regulated financial services business. Twenty years across engineering, product, and platform leadership, with an active investor seat at a European venture fund. Both sides of the table, in the same week.
Vedran started Greater Bear after watching otherwise sharp investment committees, including ones he sits on, write checks against AI narratives that wouldn’t survive a serious code review. The thesis is simple: investors deserve the quality of technical judgment they’d get from their best operating partner, on every deal, in days, not months.
We deliberately keep the book small, so the work stays operator-grade.
You see strong AI deal flow but don’t have the in-house CTO. Each deal needs a serious technical read; building that capability internally isn’t worth the fixed cost.
You backed the seed and now need to confirm the AI/tech story has actually matured before you lead the A. The original DD is two years stale; the model environment has changed three times.
You’re looking at one AI-flavored deck a week and the team’s pattern-matching is starting to fail. You want a reliable partner with a repeatable framework, on retainer.
Greater Bear is a young practice. Rather than lead with testimonials we couldn’t honestly publish yet, we lead with what goes into writing on every engagement, signed before the kickoff call.
The kickoff call locks every variable. If we miss the delivery date, the engagement is on us, not on you.
No platform partnerships. No referral fees from vendors we evaluate. No silent positions in companies we assess. If a conflict exists, you see it before you sign.
The person on your kickoff call writes the report and presents to your IC. No junior team behind the curtain, no template assembly.
If your question isn’t here, the fastest way to get one is a 30-minute intro call.
A 30-minute intro call. We talk through the deal you’re looking at. You leave with a sharper sense of what to watch for, whether or not we end up working together.