Technical Due Diligence
Technical due diligence answers one practical question: is the technology what it appears to be, and what will it cost to maintain, scale, or integrate? We perform this assessment for investors evaluating an acquisition, companies considering a partnership, and leadership teams inheriting a system they did not build. The findings give you the information needed to price risk correctly and negotiate accordingly.
Capabilities
What technical due diligence covers
Before you buy
Pre-acquisition Assessment
A structured review of the target company's codebase, infrastructure, and engineering practices for investors or acquirers. We identify material technical risks — architectural fragility, significant security vulnerabilities, critical key-person dependencies, or misleading technical claims — before they become liabilities post-close.
What you are inheriting
Codebase Quality Assessment
Reviewing code quality across dimensions that affect maintainability and extension cost: test coverage, documentation state, dependency health, code consistency, and the proportion of the codebase that is actively maintained versus abandoned. Technical debt is only a problem when it is invisible.
What breaks at scale
Architecture Risk Assessment
Evaluating the architectural decisions that determine the system's operational limits: database design, caching strategy, synchronous dependency chains, and infrastructure sizing relative to current and projected load. We identify the specific components that would fail first under growth.
Risks before they are exploited
Security Posture Review
A high-level review of the security posture: authentication and authorization patterns, secrets management, network access controls, dependency vulnerability exposure, and logging and monitoring coverage. This is not a penetration test; it is a structural assessment of security decision quality.
Beyond the code
Engineering Team Capability Assessment
Evaluating the engineering team's capacity to maintain and extend the system: team size relative to system complexity, knowledge concentration risk, development process maturity, and the documentation state. A system is only as maintainable as the team who understands it.
Post-acquisition work
Integration Complexity Report
For acquirers, an estimate of the integration effort required to connect the target system to existing infrastructure — data migration, API harmonization, authentication consolidation, and monitoring integration. Understanding integration cost before close prevents acquisition surprises.
Our approach
We read what is actually there
Technical due diligence based on demos, pitch decks, and founder interviews is due diligence theater. We access the codebase, the infrastructure configuration, the dependency manifests, and the deployment pipelines. What is actually in the repository tells us more than any presentation about it.
Findings are framed in business terms
A report full of technical jargon that a non-technical investor cannot act on is not useful. We translate technical findings into business implications: this vulnerability class has produced major incidents in similar systems; this architectural pattern limits the system to approximately X concurrent users; this key-person dependency creates a specific retention risk.
We distinguish risk from immaturity
Not every technical shortcut is a serious risk. Early-stage systems are legitimately immature in ways that are normal and fixable. We distinguish between the technical debt that reflects normal startup constraints and the patterns that indicate deeper structural problems or compromised engineering judgment.
The timeline matches deal pressure
Due diligence has a deadline. We scope the review to fit the time available while being explicit about what was not covered in the time given. A 72-hour assessment covers different ground than a two-week review; both are useful in the right context.
All engineering work is done by US-based engineers. We do not offshore any development or architecture work.
Part of our Consulting practice
FAQ
Common questions
Virginia · United States
Evaluating a software acquisition or investment?
If you need independent technical validation before making a commitment, reach out and we will scope a review that fits your timeline and decision context.