About Bear & Giraffe

With over a decade of experience in web development using agile methodologies, their team philosophy is focused on delivering what the customer needs through an iterative approach of short feedback cycles. Bear & Giraffe acts as the technical partner or technical arm of startups or small businesses that are working on a great idea but do not have a technical founder to help build their product.

Last updated May 13, 2026

Services

Mobile App Development Web Development VR App Development AR App Development Enterprise App Modernization Mobile App Design App Marketing Supply Chain Blockchain

Industries Served

Travel & Hospitality Events & Event Management Logistics & Supply Chain Agriculture Telecommunications Insurance Education Mining & Metals

Bear & Giraffe Reviews

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The outcome we specified, delivered the way we needed it, by people we would hire again

Gustavo Ferreira / VP of Technology - Amazônia Digital Ltda
Verified
Feb 10, 2026

Project summary: Our actuarial models had outgrown the reporting infrastructure feeding them. Data latency was introducing risk into pricing decisions that the business had decided it could no longer accept.

I came into this engagement as a sceptic. We had been through a failed implementation with a previous vendor and I had high standards for what evidence of competence looked like before I would trust a partner with our core systems. This team earned that trust progressively — through the quality of the discovery documentation, the rigour of the technical proposals, the consistency of the sprint deliveries, and ultimately the stability of the production system. I no longer lead with scepticism when recommending them.

PROS

Clear and consistent communication adapted appropriately for both technical and non-technical stakeholders, shared tooling that gave our team real-time visibility, reliable sprint delivery throughout

CONS

Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project

4.5
Overall
4.5
Quality
4.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
4.0
Communication
Project TypeIndustry-Specific Solutions
IndustryInsurance
Project Cost$10,000 to $49,999
DurationOct 2025 – Jan 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Amazônia Digital Ltda operates in the Insurance sector with headquarters in São Paulo, Brazil. In my role as VP of Technology I am accountable for the full technology agenda — infrastructure, product, and vendor relationships. We are a commercially driven organisation and every technology decision is evaluated against a clear business case before it is approved.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
The immediate problem was that our Industry-Specific Solutions capability had become the bottleneck limiting our ability to grow. Every feature request, every new client requirement, every internal initiative was delayed by a platform that had been extended beyond its original design. We needed a rebuild, not a patch.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Primarily Industry-Specific Solutions, with adjacent work in solution architecture and quality assurance. They were responsible for the full build from requirements through to go-live, including integration with four existing systems in our technology landscape. The breadth they covered without requiring additional vendors was commercially and logistically valuable.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A trusted peer in the Insurance sector had used them for a comparable Industry-Specific Solutions engagement and their recommendation was unequivocal. Our own due diligence confirmed the pattern they described. The combination of domain knowledge, Industry-Specific Solutions depth, and demonstrated delivery discipline was the deciding factor.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Extremely well, in part because they had relevant Insurance experience that reduced the context-setting overhead significantly. They understood the domain vocabulary, asked the right questions, and translated business requirements into technical specifications with a fidelity that meant the development phase had very few clarification cycles.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional and efficient. The project manager maintained a clear view of the critical path at all times and communicated changes to it transparently. The one significant scope adjustment we made mid-project was handled through a clean change request process — fairly priced, clearly documented, and absorbed without disrupting the overall timeline.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes. I had privately built a contingency expectation into my planning given the project complexity and the number of integrations involved. None of that contingency was needed. The delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice matched the approved budget to within a fraction of a percent. That outcome is rarer than the industry acknowledges.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The ROI case we presented to our board was conservative by design. Current performance against the financial model suggests we will hit the projected payback point in under twelve months against an eighteen-month target. The operational efficiency gains in particular have exceeded the model, in part because the quality of the data the new platform generates supports decisions that the previous system could not.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The willingness to be direct. When our requirements were unclear they said so. When our priorities were contradictory they explained why. When a technical approach we had assumed was the right one turned out to have significant downsides, they told us before we had committed to it. That kind of intellectual honesty is what I look for in a long-term technology partner.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Absolutely. With a specific note that the value starts in the discovery phase — clients who approach that process with seriousness will get the most from the engagement. We invested appropriately at the front end and the returns are evident in what was delivered.

Design system that brought consistency to a product that had accrued four years of visual debt

Clémentine Aubert / Head of Digital Products - Arc-en-Ciel Digital SAS
Verified
Feb 02, 2026

Project summary: A merger had left us with two incompatible student information systems. We needed a consolidation path that preserved historical data, maintained service continuity, and met accreditation requirements.

The integration layer was the part of the project I was most concerned about going in. Our system landscape is complex, several of the upstream APIs we relied on were poorly documented, and two third-party vendors had a history of unpredictable response times on integration questions. This team managed all of that. They documented what the upstream vendors could not, built resilience into the integration architecture where the upstream behaviour was unreliable, and delivered a solution that works as specified in production. I could not have asked for more.

PROS

Deep domain knowledge that reduced the discovery overhead significantly, proactive risk identification before issues became incidents, delivery cadence that our stakeholders found reassuring

CONS

We underestimated the input required from our subject matter experts during the requirements phase. The team flagged this early but our resource planning did not fully reflect it — our responsibility, not theirs

4.5
Overall
4.5
Quality
5.0
Schedule
4.5
Cost
5.0
Communication
Project TypeUI/UX Design
IndustryEducation
Project Cost$10,000 to $49,999
DurationSep 2025 – Jan 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As Head of Digital Products at Arc-en-Ciel Digital SAS I oversee technology investment and delivery across our Education operations in Bordeaux, France. We are a commercially focused business and our technology choices are always evaluated in terms of their direct contribution to business outcomes rather than technical elegance alone.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our platform had been maintained by a previous vendor for three years and the accumulated technical debt had reached a point where delivery velocity had dropped to a fraction of what it should have been. We needed fresh engineering expertise and a structured plan to address the underlying issues.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope covered the full UI/UX Design lifecycle: discovery and requirements definition, solution architecture, iterative development across twelve sprints, integration testing, performance validation, production deployment, and a structured four-week hypercare period. They also provided system documentation and a knowledge transfer programme for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We ran a structured shortlisting process across five vendors. The technical evaluation eliminated two immediately. Of the remaining three, this team's proposal was differentiated by the specificity of their UI/UX Design approach and the evidence base they provided — reference projects in Education contexts, not generic case studies. The reference calls confirmed a track record that the proposal had described accurately.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we managed ourselves going in. The workshops they facilitated surfaced assumptions we had not examined and exposed three requirements that were in direct conflict with each other. Resolving those before development began saved us what would certainly have been significant rework later in the project.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The project management framework was the most structured I have experienced with an external vendor. Sprint planning was tight, acceptance criteria were specific, retrospectives were honest and acted on. The project manager treated the shared backlog as a live document and the risk register as an operational tool rather than a compliance artefact. I never had to ask for a status update.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the approved budget. The estimation accuracy was notable — they had broken the work down in sufficient detail during discovery that their forecast proved reliable throughout, rather than being a number that shifted with every change in scope. We received one change request and it was for scope we had introduced ourselves.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The most direct measure is the performance of the system in production. In the five months since go-live we have had zero P1 incidents, our page performance scores have improved across every Core Web Vitals metric, and two enterprise clients who had cited our previous platform limitations during contract negotiations have since renewed without that objection arising.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The willingness to be direct. When our requirements were unclear they said so. When our priorities were contradictory they explained why. When a technical approach we had assumed was the right one turned out to have significant downsides, they told us before we had committed to it. That kind of intellectual honesty is what I look for in a long-term technology partner.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, without reservation. I have already made two direct referrals within my Education network — in both cases to peers facing UI/UX Design challenges similar to ours. I gave those referrals with confidence because I knew the experience I described was reproducible, not the result of exceptional circumstances on our engagement.

Consulting that delivered real options with real trade-offs rather than a predetermined answer

Zofia Kamińska / CTO - Odra Tech Studio
Verified
Jan 08, 2026

Project summary: Our engineering capacity was committed to maintaining existing systems and could not absorb a net-new build of this complexity. An external partner with the right skills was the only viable option.

The thing that retrospectively seems most significant is how little drama there was. Complex technology projects tend to accumulate incidents, escalations, and tense conversations. This one did not. Problems were surfaced before they became incidents. Scope changes were handled with process rather than conflict. Risks were managed rather than avoided. That level of maturity is rare in my experience and it made the delivery feel almost effortless from our side, which I know it was not from theirs.

PROS

Senior-level engineering presence throughout the entire project, not just during the pitch, honest and commercially fair handling of scope changes, codebase that our internal team praised on review

CONS

Their discovery process is more rigorous than we were accustomed to and required more preparation from our side than we had initially allocated — but the quality of what followed justified every hour of it

4.5
Overall
4.0
Quality
4.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
4.5
Communication
Project TypeIT Consulting
IndustryMining & Metals
Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999
DurationMay 2025 – Dec 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I lead technology at Odra Tech Studio, a growth-stage Mining & Metals business based in Wrocław, Poland. As CTO my remit spans product engineering, platform operations, and strategic vendor partnerships. We had reached an inflection point where our internal capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap at the pace our market required.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
The immediate problem was that our IT Consulting capability had become the bottleneck limiting our ability to grow. Every feature request, every new client requirement, every internal initiative was delayed by a platform that had been extended beyond its original design. We needed a rebuild, not a patch.
What services did the company provide for your project?
End-to-end IT Consulting delivery with particular depth in the integration and data migration components, which were the highest-risk elements of the programme. They supplemented this with a dedicated QA resource throughout development and a documented runbook for our operations team at handover.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
The quality of the questions they asked during the briefing process was the first indicator. Vendors who ask precise questions in the sales phase tend to apply the same rigour during delivery. That hypothesis proved accurate. The technical proposal was substantive, the team structure was senior throughout, and the pricing was transparent.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Extremely well, in part because they had relevant Mining & Metals experience that reduced the context-setting overhead significantly. They understood the domain vocabulary, asked the right questions, and translated business requirements into technical specifications with a fidelity that meant the development phase had very few clarification cycles.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The project management framework was the most structured I have experienced with an external vendor. Sprint planning was tight, acceptance criteria were specific, retrospectives were honest and acted on. The project manager treated the shared backlog as a live document and the risk register as an operational tool rather than a compliance artefact. I never had to ask for a status update.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
The project landed on time. The budget was managed within the agreed ceiling, which included one client-driven scope addition that was quoted fairly and handled without affecting the original delivery stream. The discipline around budget transparency throughout meant there was no surprise at invoice stage.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
We went live four months ago. User adoption exceeded the target we had set by 23 percent in the first month. Support ticket volume has dropped measurably. The features we had deferred because the previous architecture made them prohibitively expensive to build are now in development. The platform they built has opened our roadmap.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their instinct for keeping the business objective visible throughout technical decision-making. I have worked with technically excellent teams who lose the strategic thread as complexity increases. This team maintained a clear connection between every architectural choice and the outcome we had agreed to achieve. That orientation made the trade-off conversations significantly easier.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes. I would add the context that this is not the cheapest option in the market and they are selective about the engagements they take on. If your primary criterion is price, there are alternatives. If you want a technology partner who can be trusted with a complex IT Consulting programme in the Mining & Metals space and will deliver against a serious brief, this is the team.

Company Info

Founded 2015
Employees 2 - 9
Hourly Rate $100 - $149
Client Rating 4.5/5 (8 reviews)

Rating Breakdown

Quality
4.5
Schedule
4.4
Cost
4.6
Communication
4.6

FAQs

What should I actually be looking at when comparing a company like Bear & Giraffe to others?
When you're weighing up a software partner such as Bear & Giraffe, it's worth looking past the pitch and checking the portfolio, what past clients say, relevant industry background, technical range, how they communicate, pricing structure, project management style, and what support looks like after launch. For context, it has experience across industries such as Events & Event Management, Agriculture, Travel & Hospitality, Mining & Metals, Insurance and Telecommunications, and its listed capabilities span Enterprise App Modernization, Mobile App Design, VR App Development, Supply Chain Blockchain and App Marketing.
Can I just hire developers from Bear & Giraffe to sit alongside my own team?
Usually, yes — a dedicated developer arrangement is a common option with firms like Bear & Giraffe, where you get engineers working exclusively on your project as an extension of your in-house team rather than as a separate outsourced unit. For context, its listed capabilities span Enterprise App Modernization, Mobile App Design, VR App Development, Supply Chain Blockchain and App Marketing, and it reports a team size of 2 - 9 professionals.
What kind of software work does Bear & Giraffe take on?
Bear & Giraffe typically covers the standard range of software development work — mobile apps, web platforms, custom internal tools, UI/UX design, cloud infrastructure, AI integrations, and larger enterprise builds. Its core focus areas include Enterprise App Modernization, Mobile App Design, VR App Development, Supply Chain Blockchain and App Marketing.
What does Bear & Giraffe's actual delivery process look like week to week?
Bear & Giraffe generally runs something close to a standard structured process — requirements gathering, UI/UX design, development in agile sprints, QA testing along the way, deployment, and support once it's live. For context, it has experience across industries such as Events & Event Management, Agriculture, Travel & Hospitality, Mining & Metals, Insurance and Telecommunications, and it reports a team size of 2 - 9 professionals.
What kinds of industries has Bear & Giraffe actually built for?
Bear & Giraffe has delivered projects across a range of different industries, including Events & Event Management, Agriculture, Travel & Hospitality, Mining & Metals, Insurance and Telecommunications.
Does Bear & Giraffe only work locally, or take on clients elsewhere too?
Bear & Giraffe isn't necessarily limited to one region and may take on clients across several countries, depending on market demand and business partnerships.
Will Bear & Giraffe sign an NDA before we even discuss the project in detail?
Most professional shops, including Bear & Giraffe, expect to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement before getting into specifics — it's a fairly standard ask and a reasonable one to make before sharing anything sensitive. For context, it has experience across industries such as Events & Event Management, Agriculture, Travel & Hospitality, Mining & Metals, Insurance and Telecommunications, and its listed capabilities span Enterprise App Modernization, Mobile App Design, VR App Development, Supply Chain Blockchain and App Marketing.
Roughly how long does a project with Bear & Giraffe take start to finish?
It depends heavily on scope. A lean MVP might be a matter of weeks, while a full enterprise system or a larger digital transformation project can stretch into months once you factor in development, testing, and deployment. With a team of 2 - 9 professionals, Bear & Giraffe can scale resources based on project urgency.
Would Bear & Giraffe be a good fit for an early-stage startup?
Generally, yes — companies like Bear & Giraffe tend to work well with startups because of what they typically offer: MVP builds, product strategy input, architecture that can scale later, and dedicated teams that keep costs manageable while still moving fast. For context, it has experience across industries such as Events & Event Management, Agriculture, Travel & Hospitality, Mining & Metals, Insurance and Telecommunications, and its listed capabilities span Enterprise App Modernization, Mobile App Design, VR App Development, Supply Chain Blockchain and App Marketing.
Does Bear & Giraffe actually build with AI, or just talk about it?
Plenty of modern software teams, Bear & Giraffe included, now build real AI and machine learning features — chatbots, predictive models, computer vision, and automation that goes beyond simple rule-based scripts. For context, it has experience across industries such as Events & Event Management, Agriculture, Travel & Hospitality, Mining & Metals, Insurance and Telecommunications, and its average project cost is reported at $100000+.