Your company has outgrown the way it runs.

ScaleForge finds the operational and leadership breaks that slow funded scaleups after Series A, and fixes the ones that cost the most. In weeks, not quarters. With your team, not around it.

Get in touch See the diagnostic

Structured diagnostic used across funded scaleups and their investors. Typical engagement: 3-week diagnostic, 8 to 12 week implementation. Fixed scope. Fixed fee. Co-founded by Inna Pearce and Veronica Mihai.

Between Series A and Series B, roughly two in three funded scaleups stall. Very few stall because the product stopped working. They stall because the operating model that got the company to its first millions cannot carry it to the next stage.

Founder dependency

The business cannot decide, close, or ship without the founder in the room. Every escalation lands on your desk. The bottleneck is structural, not personal.

Non-scalable processes

Operations built for 10 people being stretched to run 40. Everything works on heroics, nothing on systems. Each new hire adds complexity instead of capacity.

Leadership incoherence

The team hired under fire was never designed as a team. Accountability dissolves, rhythm drifts, conflict gets avoided. None of this shows up in the metrics until the quarter you miss plan.

The ScaleForge diagnostic

Two integrated tracks. Nine domains. One process.

Most diagnostics look at operations or leadership. We run both in parallel, because the combination is what kills scaling companies. A new process run by a conflict-avoidant exec team reverts to chaos in 90 days.

Track A

Structure

Assesses the structural foundation: how work flows, who decides what, and whether the operating model can support the next stage of growth.

Process and handovers
Decision flow
Role clarity
KPI visibility
Strategy alignment

5 domains scored 0 to 10

Track B

Capability

Assesses the human layer behind every operational pattern: whether the founder, leadership team, and people have the capacity and authority to make the structure work.

Founder shift
Team ownership
Decision velocity
Collaboration

4 domains scored 0 to 10

What you receive

Four outputs. All grounded in your own data.

Not a perception survey. Not benchmarks applied from outside. Findings calculated from your own revenue, headcount, and time data, with financial impact attached to each bottleneck.

Risk heatmap

All 9 domains scored 0 to 10. Both tracks side by side. Alignment gaps between role levels surfaced and named.

Bottleneck map

Issues ranked by impact-to-effort ratio. Each with a financial estimate and root condition analysis.

Cost of inaction

Annual cost of each issue calculated from your own revenue, headcount, and time data. Not generic benchmarks.

90-day plan

Three-phase roadmap with named owners, milestones, and success criteria across both tracks. A document the team runs on Monday.

How it works

One process. Four stages.

The diagnostic runs founder and team responses in parallel, which is where the signal lives. We look for divergence between what leadership sees and what the team experiences day to day.

Onboarding and data collection

Role-adaptive questionnaire sent simultaneously to all levels. AI guides question sequencing and flags early patterns before interviews begin.

AI at intake

Interviews and documents

Live sessions with founder and COO. Async voice for department heads. AI generates tailored interview questions from early responses.

AI-generated questions

AI synthesis and scoring

All inputs synthesised across 9 domains. Divergences surfaced. Bottlenecks ranked by impact. Financial cost estimated from your own data.

AI analysis

Readout and roadmap

90-minute session with founder and COO. Risk heatmap, bottleneck map, cost of inaction, and 90-day plan with named owners and milestones.

In person

On anonymity

Team member responses, both form answers and voice recordings, are never shared with the CEO or leadership team in individual form. What leadership receives is a synthesised finding. Voice recordings are transcribed and discarded. Every respondent is told this before they answer anything.

Why both tracks

Fix the system and the people inside it. Or do not bother fixing either.

Every scaling engagement that fails, fails on one axis. Consultants rebuild processes and leave. The behaviour snaps the new process back into the old shape inside 90 days. Coaches work on the founder. The broken operating model eats any gain within a quarter.

Operational track

Audit across 9 domains in two tracks
Bottlenecks quantified in hours and euros
Top priorities ranked by impact-to-effort
90-day execution roadmap with owners and metrics
Redesign of 1 to 2 critical processes, rolled out live

Leadership track

Founder dependency mapped and scored
Exec-team dynamics and decision patterns surfaced
Behavioural blockers identified
Meeting architecture and accountability model reset
Exit criteria: the team runs the new system without us

We measure both before and after. The engagement closes on evidence, not opinion.

Who this is for

Founders who feel the friction and want the honest picture.

Scaleup founders and operators

Post-seed to pre-Series B. 15 to 100 people. Product works, revenue is growing, the company is hurting. You are the bottleneck and you know it. You need the honest picture, and the fix, without handing the company over to a six-month consulting engagement.

You feel the friction but cannot point at a single cause. It is everywhere and nowhere at once.

Decisions pile up on you even when you have tried to delegate. The escalations keep coming.

You want evidence, not opinions. You have had enough consultants who agree with whoever is in the room.

You want a plan, not a report. Something you can hand to your leadership team on Monday.

Not sure if this is the right moment?

We turn down companies outside the band we are built for. The methodology is calibrated to funded scaleups at a specific stage of friction. Here is how to know if this is right.

Right now if decisions that should take hours are taking days and they all end up with you.

Right now if every new hire adds complexity instead of capacity.

Too early if you are under 15 people. The operating friction this is built for usually has not shown up yet.

Write to us anyway if you are over 60 people or outside the band. We will be honest about fit.

See execution risk three quarters before your metrics do.

ScaleForge gives VCs, accelerators, and advisory firms a standardised operational diagnostic across their portfolio. Comparable scores. Early warning signals. Something to do about it before the numbers show it.

Book a 30-minute briefing See what you get

Structured diagnostic used across funded scaleups and their investors. Fixed scope. Fixed fee. Portfolio rates available for funds running 3 or more diagnostics concurrently. Co-founded by Inna Pearce and Veronica Mihai.

Between board meetings, you are flying on self-reported metrics, founder mood, and whatever your most engaged partner happens to notice. That is not a portfolio strategy. It is a lagging indicator with a dashboard on top.

No operational baseline

You have conviction on the thesis. Post-cheque operational visibility is a different matter. By the time the numbers flag a problem, you are already in it.

No comparable picture

Each company in your portfolio is assessed differently, by different people, on different criteria. You cannot rank execution risk or prioritise partner bandwidth without a consistent framework.

No structured intervention

When you do spot a problem, the response is ad hoc. A call here, an intro there. The companies that need real operational work get hand-holding. The ones that need to be left alone get too much attention.

What you get

Six things your current tooling does not give you.

One standardised diagnostic, run across the portfolio. Comparable execution health scores across all companies. Partner-ready artefacts in under four weeks.

Portfolio heatmap

Every company scored on the same nine domains across two tracks, ranked by execution risk and intervention priority. Partner-ready in under four weeks.

Deep diagnostics on flagged companies

Full two-track diagnostic on companies that surface as high-risk or high-leverage, with investor-facing summaries you can take into an IC.

Done-with-you implementation

Inside selected companies. Not reports. Change that ships: process redesign, accountability reset, decision framework installed and running.

Live portfolio dashboard

Intervention flags across the portfolio. What to monitor, how, and where to step in. Refreshed quarterly so you are never flying blind between board meetings.

LP-ready cohort benchmarks

"Our cohort scores in the top quartile on Series A operational readiness" — backed by the underlying artefact, not anecdote.

Pre-investment diagnostic

Operational due diligence on target companies before you write the cheque. See what you are inheriting before it becomes a board problem.

How it runs

The same diagnostic. Scaled across your portfolio.

Each company goes through the same four-stage process. You receive comparable output across all of them, with a combined view for partners and a confidential company-level report for each founder.

Portfolio scan

We run a lightweight intake across all companies to surface which ones need full diagnostics and which ones can be monitored. Portfolio heatmap delivered in under four weeks.

Portfolio-wide

Full diagnostics on flagged companies

Two-track diagnostic with founder, COO, department heads, and team. AI synthesis across 9 domains. Financial impact from the company's own data.

AI-assisted

Investor-facing summaries

Each flagged company produces a partner-ready summary: risk heatmap, top 3 bottlenecks, financial impact, and recommended intervention. IC-ready artefact.

Partner-ready

Quarterly refresh

Dashboard updated each quarter. Progress tracked against the 90-day roadmap. New flags surfaced before they become board-level problems.

Ongoing

On confidentiality

Company-level findings are confidential to the company by default. Anything aggregated for investor reporting is anonymised unless the company explicitly opts in. The contract spells this out. We are not a platform team replacement. We are the structured diagnostic and implementation layer that does not scale on partner bandwidth alone.

The methodology

Nine domains. Two tracks. One comparable score.

Every company in your portfolio is assessed on the same framework. That means you can rank them, compare them, and explain your portfolio's operational health to LPs with something other than anecdote.

Track A — Structure (5 domains)

Process and handovers
Decision flow
Role clarity
KPI visibility
Strategy alignment

Track B — Capability (4 domains)

Founder shift
Team ownership
Decision velocity
Collaboration

Each domain scored 0 to 10. ScaleReady Index calculated as a composite. Re-measured each quarter to track intervention impact.

Who this is built for

Funds and programmes with active portfolio companies.

Early-stage VCs and accelerators

Funds and accelerators with 10 to 80 active companies. Thesis conviction is strong. Post-cheque operational visibility is not. You want to see execution risk before your metrics do, and have something structured to do about it.

Portfolio-wide visibility on operational health, not just board decks and gut feel.

Early warning signals for companies heading into execution trouble before the numbers show it.

A structured methodology you can offer to portfolio companies as a credible value-add, not just a referral.

Progress tracked over time with quarterly check-ins against the same framework. Comparable, not anecdotal.

What we are not

We are unusually comfortable working ourselves out of a job. We diagnose, build the plan, and hand off. We do not try to stay in the engagement longer than the work requires.

Not a platform team replacement. We sit in front of your existing platform, fractional, or operator-in-residence.

Not a coaching product. The leadership track is diagnostic and structural, not therapeutic.

Not a reporting layer. We produce artefacts you can use, not dashboards you have to manage.

Not a long engagement. Portfolio scan in under four weeks. Full diagnostic in three. We move at scaleup speed.

Who is behind this

Operators, not consultants.

ScaleForge is built by people who have been on the other side of the table: scaling companies, breaking under the same friction we now diagnose.

ScaleForge is built by people who have scaled companies and worked alongside investors. We understand both sides of the table.

Inna Pearce

Co-Founder

I help leaders and businesses scale fast, without losing control or becoming the bottleneck. Over 20 years I have built international shared service centres and designed financial and tech platforms that enable multi-market expansion, scaling early-stage teams to 200-person organisations across three continents, with alignment from investors including institutions like the IMF.

What I fix: founder bottlenecks into self-sufficient teams, slow execution into scalable processes, misalignment into clarity between teams and leadership, and fragile operations into structurally ready businesses. I combine operational execution at CFO level with leadership change work (EMBA Switzerland, NLP Master Practitioner).

CFO-level executionProcess transformationMulti-continent scalingIMF-backed programmes

Veronica Mihai

Co-Founder

I help scale-ups professionalise operations and make growth predictable and efficient. When growth outpaces structure, I step in to build the operating engine that sustains expansion: designing KPI frameworks tied to cash, implementing governance systems, aligning leadership teams, and institutionalising execution rhythms.

My background spans hedge fund operations, strategic advisory, digital transformation, and cross-border business management across Europe and global markets. Recognised as one of the Top 100 Women of the Future (2024), I integrate AI and automation to enhance clarity and speed, with a focus on system design, decision architecture, and accountability.

Top 100 Women of the Future 2024Digital transformationKPI and governance designAI and automation

Frequently asked

Before you get in touch.

How is this different from a Big-4 operational audit?

Different audience, different time horizon, different cost. We work with 15 to 100 person scaleups, not Fortune 500s. We deliver in three weeks, not three months. Our methodology is built specifically for the failure modes of companies that outgrew their original operating model, not for optimising a mature one.

Why two tracks? Can we just fix operations?

You can. Most do. They come back six months later because the behavioural layer ate the new process. A conflict-avoidant exec team running a well-designed system reverts to the old shape within a quarter. We fix both on the first pass because that is what makes the change hold.

How much of my leadership team's time does this take?

Founder: around 3 hours of interviews plus a 90-minute readout. COO: similar. Department heads: 60-minute async interviews. Team members: a 20-minute questionnaire. Most of the heavy lifting is on us, not you.

Where does AI come in, and where does it not?

AI accelerates the parts that would otherwise take a consulting team weeks: document analysis, cross-referencing responses, surfacing discrepancies between what different people told us, generating interview questions from early patterns. Judgement, interviews, and the final recommendations are human work. The AI is the researcher, not the advisor.

What happens to my team's data and interview transcripts?

Voice recordings are transcribed, used for synthesis, and discarded. Transcripts live in your engagement only. They are not used to train any AI model, not resold, not shared across clients. Team members are told this before they answer, and their individual responses are never shown to leadership.

What if we are pre-Series A or over 100 people?

Under 15 people, the operating friction this diagnostic is built for usually has not shown up yet. Over 100, we can still help but the engagement looks different: more department-specific, less whole-company. Write to us either way and we will be honest about fit.

How does this sit alongside our existing platform team or operator-in-residence?

It sits in front. We diagnose and build the plan. In some cases we hand off directly to an existing fractional or platform lead. We are unusually comfortable working ourselves out of a job. The diagnostic produces the artefact; you decide what to do with it.

How long does the portfolio scan take?

Portfolio heatmap delivered in under four weeks. Full diagnostics on flagged companies take an additional three weeks each. IC-ready summaries produced alongside the full report.

What about confidentiality with the companies?

Company-level findings are confidential to the company by default. Anything aggregated for investor reporting is anonymised unless the company explicitly opts in. The contract spells this out, and founders see it before the diagnostic begins.

Do you offer cohort pricing for accelerators?

Yes. Portfolio engagements covering five or more companies use a single methodology with a combined insights layer for LPs or programme managers. Pricing scales sub-linearly with volume. Ask for the portfolio brief.

Can we run the diagnostic pre-investment as operational due diligence?

Yes. The same two-track diagnostic applies. You see what you are inheriting operationally before you write the cheque. Output is an IC-ready summary with risk heatmap, bottleneck map, and a ScaleReady Index for the target company.

How many companies do you need in a portfolio to make this worthwhile?

We work with funds from 10 active companies upward. Below that, individual company diagnostics are more appropriate than a portfolio scan. Write to us and we will advise on the right entry point.