Startup Technical Due Diligence
& Codebase Audit

Why Startup Technical Due Diligence Matters

Technology is often the most valuable - and most opaque - asset in a deal. A polished demo can mask years of technical debt, brittle architecture, or a team that cannot scale. Our startup codebase audit for investors gives you a clear, honest picture of what you are buying into, whether you are a VC technical due diligence consultant evaluating a pre-Series A startup, a PE firm assessing an acquisition, or a founder preparing for investor scrutiny through a software architecture review.

Who This Is For

What We Assess

Our Process

• ✔ Scoping call - understand the deal context, timeline, and specific concerns
• ✔ Documentation review - architecture diagrams, runbooks, org charts, security policies
• ✔ Codebase deep-dive - hands-on review of repositories, test suites, deployment pipelines
• ✔ Team interviews - conversations with CTO, engineering leads, and key engineers
• ✔ Risk report - executive summary with traffic-light scoring, detailed findings, and remediation roadmap
• ✔ Board presentation - we present findings directly to investors, boards, or leadership teams

What the Timeline Looks Like

A standard assessment runs two to three weeks from scoping call to report, which fits inside most exclusivity periods. Compressed versions are possible and we will say so honestly when the compression starts costing you coverage rather than just comfort.

The first few days are documentation and repository access, which is also the first finding: how long it takes a target to produce architecture documentation, access controls and an accurate list of their own systems tells you a great deal before anyone reads a line of code. Days three to seven are the codebase itself - commit history, test coverage on the paths that matter rather than in aggregate, dependency and licence position, deployment pipeline, infrastructure definitions. The interviews come next, deliberately after the code, because knowing what the repository says makes it obvious which answers to probe.

We then spend a day writing rather than investigating. A report produced in the gaps between other work reads like a list of observations; a report written in one pass has a thesis, which is what the investment committee actually needs.

What You Get at the End

A written report, typically twenty to thirty pages, structured so it can be read at three depths. An executive summary of one to two pages that an investment committee can act on. A traffic-light scoring across the areas above, so the shape of the risk is visible without reading the detail. Then the findings themselves, each with evidence, a severity, an estimate of what remediation involves and - the part most reports omit - whether it is a reason not to proceed or simply something to budget for after completion.

That last distinction is where most of the value sits. Almost every technology business has problems. A report that lists twenty of them without ranking which ones threaten the thesis has moved the work onto you rather than doing it. We say plainly which findings would change our view of the deal and which are ordinary engineering debt that any company of that size would carry.

We also present it. Written reports get skimmed; a live session where the investment committee can push back on a finding and get a straight answer is where the assessment earns its fee. Where a deal proceeds, the same document becomes the first hundred days of the technical roadmap, which is why we write remediation as sequenced work rather than as a list of complaints.

What Independence Actually Means Here

We do not sell implementation off the back of the report, and we do not take a position that depends on the deal completing. That matters more than it sounds: an assessor who hopes to win the remediation contract has a quiet incentive to find expensive problems, and an assessor connected to the deal has the opposite one. Both distort the report in ways that are hard to detect from the outside.

The engagement is also done by someone who has run engineering teams rather than by an analyst working from a questionnaire. Judging whether an architecture will survive three years of growth, or whether a team can operate what they have built, is a judgement call informed by having been responsible for the consequences. Our due diligence checklist sets out the full scope we work through, and it is published rather than kept behind a sales conversation.

Fees depend on the size of the codebase and the depth required rather than on deal value. Day rates sit in the same range as our fractional CTO work, and most assessments are quoted as a fixed price once we know the scope.