Uncover Hidden Liabilities Before the Term Sheet is Signed. 🔍
Comprehensive codebase and system audits for investors mitigating risk, and founders preparing for capital raises or M&A.
Diagnosing technical liability from Seed to Series C
Bad code is an invisible liability.
You wouldn't buy a commercial building without a structural inspection, software deserves the same scrutiny.
The Black Box Risk
Behind a polished UI can lie critical security vulnerabilities, unscalable architecture, and years of unpaid technical debt.
The Rewrite Tax
Rewriting a core system because of poor initial architecture can cost 3-5x the original development budget, and investors know it.
The Valuation Hit
Undiagnosed technical liability surfaces during diligence, not before, and by then it's already discounting your term sheet.
Who this is for
Two sides of the same transaction, and the same audit serves both, from opposite directions.
Investors and acquirers
You are about to write a cheque against a system nobody outside the company has read, on the strength of a demo and a team that is highly motivated to sound confident.
What changes: A ranked, evidence-backed picture of what you are buying, including what the known problems will cost to fix and which ones you can live with.
Founders raising or selling
Somebody else's technical audit is going to happen to you regardless. The only open question is whether the findings arrive before the round or during it.
What changes: The same audit, run early, so you fix what is cheap to fix and have a prepared, credible answer for what is not.
What you get
Four artefacts. The first is written for people who do not read code, and that is deliberate.
An executive summary
Written for partners and boards rather than engineers. It says what the risk is, what it would cost, and whether it should change the decision.
Findings ranked by severity
Every finding carries the evidence it came from: the file, the query, the configuration, the commit. Nothing is asserted without something you can go and look at.
A remediation plan
Ordered by what is cheapest to fix relative to what it prevents, with an honest estimate of effort rather than a number chosen to sound decisive.
A findings debrief
A working session with whoever has to act on the report, which is usually where the useful arguments happen.
What the audit covers
Six areas. Most reports cover the first three; the last three are where the expensive surprises usually live.
1. Code and maintainability
Repository health, test coverage where it matters rather than in aggregate, and where changes actually concentrate. A codebase tells you what it is afraid of.
2. Architecture and scale
The data model, the query paths that break first, and what the system does at ten times its current load. Assumptions get tested rather than recorded.
3. Security and data protection
Dependency and licence surface, secrets handling, tenant isolation where the product is multi-tenant, and what an enterprise security review would find.
4. Delivery
How a change reaches production, how often, who is able to do it, and what happens when it goes wrong at four in the afternoon on a Friday.
5. Key-person risk
What only one person knows, and what specifically stops working the week they leave. This is the finding that most often changes a valuation.
6. Ownership
Who owns the code, what the open-source licences oblige, and whether the cloud accounts and domains are actually in the company's name.
From the workbench
The findings that actually change a number
Audits produce long reports and short lists of things that matter. These four move a valuation or a deal more often than anything else, and every one of them is visible from outside the codebase:
| What you see | What it usually is | How to check it yourself |
|---|---|---|
| One person answers every hard question | Key-person risk. Critical knowledge lives in one head and nothing forces it out. | Ask who could deploy, restore a backup and debug the payment path if that person left tomorrow. Ask them separately. |
| Dependencies nobody has looked at | Licence obligations and known vulnerabilities inherited from packages, some of which are incompatible with selling the product. | Ask for the dependency list and the licence of each. Not having one is itself the finding. |
| Tests that pass but prove nothing | High coverage over code that cannot fail, and none over the paths that handle money or customer data. | Ask which test would fail if the tenant filter were removed. |
| Infrastructure in a personal account | Domains, cloud accounts or app store listings registered to an individual rather than the company. | Ask whose email receives the domain renewal notice. |
None of these requires reading code, which is the point. The findings that change a number are usually organisational, and the ones that read as most alarming in a report are often the cheapest to fix.
FAQs
A jargon-free executive summary, a Red Flag Matrix ranking every technical risk by severity and business impact, a remediation roadmap with cost and timeline estimates, and a 90-minute debrief call to walk through the findings.
Both. VCs and M&A teams use it to validate a target's technology and quantify remediation cost before signing a term sheet; founders use the same process preemptively to fix red flags and defend their valuation before investors find them first.
Five areas: code quality and test coverage, infrastructure and scalability, security and compliance (OWASP, GDPR/SOC2 readiness), team process and CI/CD hygiene, and IP or license ownership.
Audits are scoped as a fixed engagement based on codebase size and depth required, see the pricing tiers above, or request a custom scope for M&A-level diligence.
Better to find it before the term sheet
Every problem in this list is cheaper to hear about from someone working for you than from someone working for the other side of the table.
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