What is technical due diligence?

Why it matters

When someone is about to put real money into a company, by investing or buying it, the technology is often the part they understand least and worry about most. A polished demo can hide a codebase that is brittle, undocumented, dependent on one irreplaceable engineer, or quietly leaking customer data. Technical due diligence is how a non-technical investor or acquirer finds that out before the cheque clears, not after. It translates the engineering reality into the language of risk and money, so the decision is made with eyes open.

What it looks at

A good review goes past "does the demo work." It examines the code quality and the architecture, whether the thing can actually scale, how much technical debt is buried in it, the security and data-handling risks, the testing and deployment setup, and the team, including how exposed the company is if a key person leaves. The output is a plain report: what is solid, what is risky, what it would cost to fix, ranked so a non-technical reader can act on it. It is essentially what a good CTO or fractional CTO does for a deal instead of for a product.

How we run it

Technical due diligence is one of the things we do. We audit the codebase, flag the risks, and hand you a report your lawyer can read, no jargon, no hand-waving. Because the same senior people who build software also review it, we can tell the difference between debt that is normal for the stage and debt that should change the price or kill the deal. The point is not to scare anyone. It is to make sure the number on the term sheet matches the software underneath it.