The Bear Group Ltd launches Zolanius, an independent due diligence practice for early-stage investors
Update, October 2026. Zolanius has since widened its scope. It is now a product and technology practice for startups from seed to Series B, and for the accelerators and investors behind them, offering advice, fractional roles and technical due diligence. All client work now runs under it. The assessment rule has changed with it: Zolanius does not assess a company for an investor if either founder has worked for that company, fractional or otherwise, in the previous six months, because the founders cannot review their own work. Working for a company after assessing it is allowed. The release below is the record of the launch on 1 July 2026. Since then, its first paragraph, its Core and Bloat reference and the company boilerplate have been edited, and the launch fees and independence terms removed, to match the current scope.
The Bear Group Ltd today launched Zolanius™, an independent due diligence practice that assesses product and technology risk for early-stage investors. The practice is built on Core and Bloat™, a classification method developed by the group's founders and applied in every assessment.
Most technical due diligence examines the codebase, the architecture and the infrastructure. That review is necessary, and Zolanius does not duplicate it. The risks that decide early-stage outcomes usually sit between the technology and the product, people and process around it. A product can pass a technical review and still lose most new users at step four of onboarding. Architecture can be clean while the consent and data experience would not survive regulatory scrutiny. An engineering team can be strong while the design function is resourced for a product half the size of the roadmap.
Zolanius assesses four domains in one engagement, product, technology, people and execution, and delivers a single verdict rather than separate reports. Both founders work directly on every assessment and neither delegates.
Core and Bloat is the classification underneath the read. Every part of a system goes into exactly one of four categories: Core, what the product must do; Platform, what it needs to operate; Bloat, cost carried without return; and No-Go, what was considered and consciously rejected. The categories are not fixed. Things drift, almost always toward Bloat, and catching that while removal is still cheap is the point of the method. It is published at coreandbloat.com and is applied in all Zolanius work.
"Most of what we find could have been found earlier," said Dirk Bauer, co-founder of Zolanius and a director of The Bear Group Ltd. "It usually was not, because nobody was asked to look at the product, the technology, the people and the process at the same time."
"Teams usually know something feels off long before they can explain why," said Waranya Chamrat, co-founder of Zolanius and a director of The Bear Group Ltd. "An investor is buying whatever the team has not been able to name yet."
About The Bear Group Ltd
The Bear Group Ltd is the Hong Kong holding company behind Zolanius, a product and technology practice for startups from seed to Series B, and the accelerators and investors behind them. Waranya Chamrat and Dirk Bauer founded it together in 2020. It holds the Core and Bloat trademark. Dirk Bauer has thirty-five years building and leading technology teams across fourteen industries and has led distributed engineering teams since 2005. Waranya Chamrat has twelve years in product strategy and UX research across SaaS, IoT, fintech, e-commerce and enterprise. More at thebear.group.
Press contact
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The Bear Group Ltd, Unit 2904-05, 29/F, Universal Trade Centre, 3 Arbuthnot Road, Hong Kong S.A.R.
Zolanius™ and Core and Bloat™ are trademarks of The Bear Group Ltd.