Technology Due Diligence
Know exactly what you're buying before you sign. Thorough technical assessment for M&A, PE investment, or strategic partnerships.
Key takeaways
- Technology due diligence tells you the true state of what you're buying — architecture, codebase quality, team risk, infrastructure maturity, and security posture.
- The deliverable is a written report with risk ratings by category (red/amber/green), detailed findings, and recommended deal terms or conditions.
- Timeline: 2–4 weeks from kickoff to final report. Length: 20–40 pages depending on company complexity.
- The most common finding: the technology is more fragile than it appeared — key-person dependencies, unmonitored systems, or architectural limitations that affect scalability.
Why technical due diligence matters
Technology companies are bought and sold on the premise that the technology is an asset. It often isn’t. What looks like a well-engineered platform from the outside can be a fragile system that only two engineers understand, running on infrastructure that’s one incident away from a multi-day outage.
Good technical due diligence tells you the true state of the technology before you close the deal — not after.
What I assess
Architecture and scalability — Is the system built to scale with the business, or are there fundamental limitations that will require significant rearchitecting? What’s the cost of growth?
Codebase quality — Not just “is the code clean” but: can new engineers be productive quickly? Is there meaningful test coverage? Are there obvious security vulnerabilities? What’s the actual technical debt burden?
Engineering team — Who are the key people? What happens if two specific engineers leave? Is the team capable of executing the roadmap, or is there a significant hiring/training gap?
Infrastructure and operations — How mature is the deployment, monitoring, and incident response practice? What does reliability look like in practice?
Security and compliance — For regulated industries: are the right controls in place? For any company: are there obvious risks that could become liabilities?
Roadmap credibility — Is the product roadmap achievable with the current team and architecture? What are the real dependencies and risks?
Deliverable
A written report covering: executive summary, risk ratings by category (red/amber/green), detailed findings, and recommended deal terms or conditions. Length: 20–40 pages depending on company complexity.
Timeline: 2–4 weeks from kickoff to final report.
Contact me to discuss a due diligence engagement.