Technical Due Diligence

What This Covers

Technical due diligence is the process of independently assessing a company's technology before a significant commitment is made - whether that's an acquisition, an investment round, or a strategic partnership. The goal is to understand what's actually there: the quality of the codebase, the soundness of the architecture, the capability of the team, and the risks that aren't visible from the outside.

It's not a tick-box exercise. A useful due diligence report tells you where the real risks are, what it would cost to address them, and whether the technology can support the business plan it's being asked to deliver. It should give you the confidence to proceed, the clarity to renegotiate, or the evidence to walk away. All three are valid outcomes.

When You Need One

The most common scenario is an acquisition. A buyer wants to know what they're inheriting - not just the features and the customer base, but the technical debt, the security posture, the bus factor, and whether the platform can scale to meet the growth projections in the business plan. These are questions that a commercial due diligence process won't answer, and they can represent significant hidden costs if they're not surfaced before completion.

Investment rounds are another common trigger. Investors increasingly want to understand the technical foundations of the businesses they're backing, particularly in SaaS and platform companies where the technology is the product. A credible technical assessment, conducted by someone independent of the founding team, provides assurance that the money is going into a platform that can deliver.

It's also worth noting that due diligence isn't only for external parties. A new CTO wanting an honest baseline of what they've inherited, or a board preparing for a future exit and wanting to understand what needs addressing before they go to market - these are equally valid reasons to commission an independent technical assessment.

What I Assess

A thorough technical due diligence covers several areas, and the depth of each depends on the context. For an acquisition, the focus tends to be broader; for an investment round, it might concentrate on scalability and security. The core areas I examine include:

Architecture and infrastructure - how the system is structured, where it's hosted, how it scales, and whether the architecture supports the business's growth ambitions. This includes deployment processes, monitoring, disaster recovery, and the degree to which the infrastructure is documented and reproducible.

Code quality and technical debt - the state of the codebase, the consistency of patterns, the presence (or absence) of tests, and the volume of technical debt. Every codebase has debt; the question is whether it's managed or whether it's compounding.

Security - authentication and authorisation models, data handling practices, dependency management, and exposure to common vulnerabilities. This isn't a penetration test, but it identifies structural security risks that would require investment to address.

Team and process - the size and structure of the engineering team, how work is planned and delivered, the maturity of the development process, and the key-person dependencies that represent risk.

Scalability - whether the platform can handle the growth that the business plan assumes, and what investment would be needed to get there if it can't.

Why My Background Matters

I've been on the other side of this process. As CTO of SUMAC, I led the technical workstream during a successful acquisition. I prepared the platform for scrutiny, presented the architecture to the acquiring company's technical team, and answered the hard questions about scalability, security, and technical debt. I know what a thorough assessment looks like from the inside, which means I know where to look and what questions to ask when I'm conducting one.

That experience also means I understand the pressure on the team being assessed. A good due diligence process is rigorous without being adversarial. The goal is to surface the truth, not to find fault for the sake of it.

What You Receive

At the end of the engagement, you receive a detailed report covering each area assessed, with findings categorised by severity and accompanied by estimated remediation costs where relevant. The report is written in plain language - it's designed to be useful to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, because the decisions it informs are business decisions, not just engineering ones.

I'm also available to discuss the findings with your team, your board, or your legal advisors, and to help translate the technical findings into commercial terms for negotiation.

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If you're preparing for an acquisition, investment round, or simply want an independent view of your technology, get in touch.