GrimalkinIdea evaluation
A rigorous, honest read on whether a product idea is technically and commercially sound — before you spend the runway finding out.
Grimalkin LLC
Your owner's engineer.
When you fund a building, you don't ask the contractor how the build is going — you retain an engineer whose only client is you. Grimalkin is that role for software and AI: staff-level judgment, on your side of the table, whether the question is a dev shop's progress, a bid, an idea, or how much of the AI hype to buy.
What we do
One role, six moments
An owner's engineer is the same job wherever it's applied: staff-level judgment that answers to you, and only you.
Contractor-bid second opinions
Independent review of agency and contractor proposals: scope, timeline, price, and the risks buried in the fine print.
The owner's engineer
The namesake: a second opinion, ongoing. Independent oversight of your dev shop by someone whose incentives align with you, not the vendor.
AI & agentic consulting
Where LLMs and agents create real leverage — from someone who sells judgment, not tokens.
AI-assisted prototyping
From zero to a working v0→v1 prototype, fast, using modern AI-assisted development to compress the build.
Team turnarounds & fractional leadership
A stuck team unstuck — process, architecture, mentorship, and the hard calls, as a fractional CTO or embedded lead who works toward not being needed.
Why Grimalkin
Two decades of shipping, rescuing, and scaling — teams included.
Grimalkin is led by iri bone — a language-agnostic staff engineer, repeat CTO, and team turnaround artist who builds v0→v1 products, rescues broken systems, and scales companies by multiplying the output of the engineers around them. The track record runs from early Amazon (a game-streaming prototype demoed to Jeff Bezos; seven US patents in cloud computing) through backend leadership on systems for Walmart and Microsoft, build systems behind a $3bn+ global e-commerce, and staff engineering at NextEra's EverBright.
That track record is the point: it's the résumé you'd want in your owner's engineer — staff-level judgment without hiring a staff-level full-timer. When a brief calls for more hands, Grimalkin brings in trusted collaborators as contractors.
Get started
Have a decision to de-risk?
Every engagement starts with the Diagnostic: $999 flat for an intake call, offline agentic research, and a results call with a written brief — backed by the Grand Guarantee. If you don't feel you got a thousand dollars of value, full refund, your call.