Will you survive technical due diligence?

The technical due-diligence checklist investors actually use

Every technical due diligence I run — and the tech DD checklist above — comes down to eight dimensions. These are where the expensive surprises hide, and the ones an investor’s technical due diligence will press on hardest:

• Security — secrets kept out of the repo, dependencies scanned and patched, least-privilege production access, and an independent review behind the code.
• IP & code ownership — complete written assignment from every contributor, employees and contractors alike, with no outstanding third-party claim.
• Architecture & scalability — whether the design holds at 10x load, and whether any single point of failure can take the product down.
• Bus factor (key-person risk) — how much of the system lives in one person’s head, and whether documentation lets someone new operate it.
• DevOps / delivery (DORA) — deploy frequency, lead time, change-failure rate, and time to restore: how the team actually ships.
• Technical debt — how much time goes to firefighting instead of building, and what migrations or rewrites overhang the roadmap.
• Test coverage & CI gating — whether meaningful tests exist and actually block a release when they fail.
• Open-source licensing — no copyleft in the core product, and a software bill of materials so nothing surprises a license scan.

How to pass technical due diligence

To pass technical due diligence, clear the deal-breakers before the data room opens — these are the red flags that don’t chip the price, they gate the deal:

• Get complete, written IP assignment from everyone who ever touched the code, including contractors.
• Resolve any outstanding third-party claim on the code in writing before diligence begins.
• Move secrets out of the repository into a managed vault, and rotate anything that leaked.
• Replace or relicense any copyleft component sitting in your core product.
• Remove the single-person dependency: document the critical systems and cross-train a second owner.

Then make the rest legible — a software bill of materials, CI-gated tests on the critical paths, a redundant architecture, and a debt-paydown plan tied to the roadmap — so the team reads as one that knows its own system. The self-reported red flags this check surfaces are exactly the ones a real investor technical due diligence will verify.

From the free check to a Pre-DD Audit

This free check is directional and self-reported. When you want the verified read — the one an investor will trust — the next step is a Pre-DD Audit: a fixed-scope, founder-side dry run of the diligence I run for investors. Same eight dimensions, evidence-checked rather than self-graded, red flags remediated, and your data room prepared so diligence accelerates your round instead of stalling it. It lives inside my Investor Readiness work — the service that gets you ready to pass technical due diligence.