Know exactly what you're acquiring before you sign.
Independent technical due diligence for VCs, PE firms, and acquirers evaluating software companies. We audit the code, architecture, infrastructure, security posture, and team capability — and quantify the technical debt in dollars, not adjectives. Built by an engineering team that has shipped 50+ production systems and knows what good code looks like from the inside.
Production systems built — we audit from an operator's perspective
Years building enterprise software since 2017
Clutch rating from verified client reviews
Typical assessment timeline, scoped to your deal schedule
Most software acquisitions skip the one review that matters most.
Financial due diligence is standard. Legal review is standard. But technical due diligence — an independent assessment of the code, architecture, and engineering team you're actually acquiring — is either skipped entirely or delegated to someone on the deal team who "knows tech."
The consequences show up 6–12 months post-close. The platform that looked stable during the demo turns out to have no test coverage and a deployment process that requires the original CTO to be in the room. The "microservices architecture" described in the pitch deck is actually a monolith with three API endpoints bolted on. The infrastructure runs on a single server with no redundancy, no monitoring, and no disaster recovery plan.
Technical debt is invisible in a financial model. It shows up as "the rewrite we didn't budget for" — $200K–$500K in unplanned engineering spend in the first year, delayed feature releases, customer churn from stability issues, and engineering hires who quit within 90 days because the codebase is unmaintainable.
None of this is detectable from a product demo, a management presentation, or a conversation with the target's CTO. It requires reading the code.
Evaluating a software acquisition? Tell us about the target and your deal timeline.
Describe the target companyA technical assessment written for investment decisions, not engineering debates.
We audit every layer of the target's technology — code quality, architecture, infrastructure, security, data, and team capability — and deliver a report that quantifies risk in terms your investment committee can act on. Not "the code could be better" — "$180K in technical debt, $40K critical, remediable in 8 weeks."
The assessment is performed by senior engineers who build production software every day — not consultants who stopped writing code five years ago. We know what production-grade architecture looks like because we ship it. That operational experience is the difference between a checklist review and a genuine risk assessment.
Every finding is categorised by severity (critical, high, medium, low), mapped to a remediation cost estimate, and flagged if it represents a deal-level risk. The report is structured so partners can read the executive summary and engineers can drill into the technical detail.
What the assessment covers.
What we find in assessments — and what it costs when it's missed.
Zero test coverage on core business logic
Found in roughly 40% of assessments
Every feature change risks breaking existing functionality. Post-acquisition engineering velocity drops 50–70% because developers are afraid to touch anything. Remediation: $60K–$120K to build a test suite retroactively.
Single-person deployment process
Found in roughly 60% of sub-$10M acquisitions
The CTO or a single engineer is the only person who can deploy to production. If they leave — and post-acquisition departures are common — the company cannot ship updates until someone reverse-engineers the process. Remediation: $20K–$40K for CI/CD pipeline and documentation.
No database migration strategy
Found in roughly 30% of assessments
Schema changes are applied manually or through ad-hoc scripts. This makes it impossible to run the application reliably in staging, makes onboarding new developers painful, and creates data integrity risks during updates. Remediation: $15K–$30K.
Hard-coded credentials and secrets in source code
Found in roughly 25% of assessments
API keys, database passwords, and third-party credentials committed to the repository. Every developer who ever had access has these credentials. A security incident waiting to happen — and a compliance failure for any SOC 2 or ISO 27001 requirement. Remediation: $5K–$15K plus a credential rotation exercise.
How the engagement works.
Scoping call
You describe the target company, the technology stack, the deal timeline, and what specific risks concern you. We scope the assessment and provide a fixed-price proposal — typically within 48 hours.
Repository and infrastructure access
We receive read-only access to the target's source code repositories, infrastructure configuration, and CI/CD pipelines. All access is under NDA. We work from our own environments — no software installed on the target's systems.
Assessment
Senior engineers review every audit dimension. We combine automated analysis (static analysis, dependency scanning, security scanning) with manual code review by engineers who build production systems daily. Duration: 1–3 weeks depending on scope.
Report delivery and walkthrough
Structured report with executive summary, dimension-by-dimension findings, severity ratings, remediation cost estimates, and deal-level risk flags. We walk your team through the findings live and answer technical questions.
Questions investors ask before engaging.
"Our operating partner has a tech background — can't they do this?"
A tech-background operating partner can assess architecture at a high level and ask the right questions in a management presentation. They cannot read 200,000 lines of code, run static analysis across 15 repositories, or quantify technical debt to a dollar figure. The assessment requires hands-on code review by engineers who currently build production software — not someone who managed engineering teams five years ago.
"The target's CTO already gave us an architecture overview."
Of course they did — they're selling. The architecture overview in a management presentation describes what the system is supposed to be, not what it actually is. We've reviewed codebases where the "microservices architecture" was a monolith, the "automated testing" was 12 unit tests from 2019, and the "cloud-native infrastructure" was a single EC2 instance. Independent verification is the point.
"We're on a tight deal timeline — can you work within it?"
Yes. We've scoped assessments to match deal timelines as short as 10 business days. A focused review (code quality, architecture, critical security) can be completed in 1 week. We prioritise findings by deal-level impact — you get the critical risks first, with the full report following.
For a detailed breakdown of every audit area and what red flags to look for in each, see the technical due diligence checklist. It covers code quality, test coverage, infrastructure, security, data architecture, team risk, and technical debt — with specific red flags and assessment criteria for each dimension.
Evaluating a software acquisition?
Tell us about the target company and your deal timeline. We'll scope an assessment and send a fixed-price proposal within 48 hours.
Request a scoped proposal