Our Approach
Every assessment is CTO-led, scoped to your thesis, and built to inform your investment decision.
How We Work
Timeline depends on engagement size and scope. Most assessments complete in 10-15 business days.
We start with your investment thesis, not a generic checklist. What are you betting on? Where do you see the biggest uncertainty? We define focus areas based on what actually matters for your decision. For a buy-and-build operator, that might mean integration risk and team absorbability. For a VC backing a Series A, it might mean scalability limits and whether the CTO can lead through the next stage. Scope, access requirements, and timeline are agreed here.
Initial conversations with the target's CTO and engineering leads to understand the landscape, identify where risk is likely concentrated, and prioritize where to dig first. This saves time and ensures the deep technical review focuses on what matters. In parallel, we begin codebase access, infrastructure review, documentation analysis, and review of any prior DD reports.
Code review, architecture mapping, deployment pipelines, dependency health, infrastructure configuration. The discovery conversations tell us where to focus. Once we have the evidence, we run follow-up interviews with engineering leads informed by what we found. Architecture walkthrough, product demo, security posture, team structure. This is where evidence meets operator judgment.
Findings scored by severity and business impact across six assessment dimensions. Each finding includes a risk rating, a description of business impact, and estimated remediation effort. The report is structured for deal partners and investment committees, not for engineers. Technical depth is available in the appendix for those who want it. Delivered with a live walkthrough for your deal team where we present findings, answer questions, and discuss implications for the deal thesis.
Optional. We don't just hand over a PDF and move on. When findings require action, we lead the implementation as a fractional CTO engagement scoped to your value creation plan. Architecture remediation, team alignment, process buildout, security posture improvement.
Assessment Dimensions
Every assessment covers these dimensions. Depth and focus varies based on deal thesis and target profile.
Technical debt quantification, migration status, and whether the architecture supports the growth your deal model assumes.
Vulnerability surface, GDPR and SOC2 readiness, dependency management, and whether the platform would survive a compliance audit today.
Monitoring maturity, cloud cost trajectory against projected growth, disaster recovery posture, and deployment automation.
Key-person risk, incident response maturity, shipping velocity, and whether the team is structured for the stage ahead or the one behind.
Real AI capability vs. API wrapper, feature adoption vs. feature bloat, roadmap credibility at current velocity, and defensibility of the product moat.
AI-driven engineering acceleration, R&D spend efficiency benchmarked to stage, automation potential, and what process optimization means for EBITDA.
Maturity Framework
Each dimension is rated on a 1–5 scale based on evidence from code review, infrastructure analysis, and expert interviews. The score reflects the target's current state relative to what's expected for their stage and size. It gives your deal team a single view of where the technology stands and where investment is needed.
What You Receive
Every assessment produces a structured report with risk-scored findings across all six dimensions. Each finding is rated by severity, mapped to business impact, and paired with estimated remediation cost and effort. Findings are prioritized into a recommended action plan. The report includes a maturity rating across all dimensions, enabling comparison over time or across portfolio companies. It is designed to be read by deal partners, not engineers. Full technical evidence is included as appendix material for those who want to go deeper.
Case Study
Climate/ESG SaaS platform. Inherited codebase, zero observability, production instability impacting sales execution and customer retention. Assessment to production stability in one quarter.
Read the Case StudyTell us about the deal. We'll tell you what we can do and how fast.