Technical due diligence that changed the price
Three weeks inside a marketplace codebase ahead of a Series B, and a written assessment the investment committee could actually act on.
- Turnaround
- 3 weeks
- Findings that blocked the plan
- 2 of 31
- Remediation priced at
- 14 engineer-months
- Outcome
- Deal repriced, then closed
The situation
The fund was late in a competitive process with limited access to the target's engineering team. They needed to know two things: whether the platform could carry the growth plan it was being valued on, and what it would cost to fix whatever was in the way.
What we did
We read the code, the pipeline, the incident history and the last two years of pull requests — the last of these being the most honest document in any company. We modelled the growth plan against the actual architecture to find where it would break, and priced the remediation in engineer-months rather than adjectives. Every finding was ranked by likelihood and cost, and separated cleanly into things that block the plan and things that are merely untidy.
Where it landed
The report identified a data-model constraint that made the plan's multi-market expansion roughly three times more expensive than the target had represented. The fund proceeded, at a revised valuation, with a remediation plan attached to the investment. We were retained afterwards to advise the incoming CTO.
Most technical diligence we commission reads like a list of opinions. This one had numbers, a ranking and a price. Our investment committee used it directly.
More work.
Twelve times the shipments, on the same infrastructure bill
A booking platform that fell over every Monday morning. We found the real bottleneck in three days, and spent the rest of the engagement making sure it could not come back.
- p95 at peak
- 8.4s → 310ms
- Peak throughput
- 12× capacity
A decade-old monolith, made changeable again — without a freeze
Eleven years of accumulated software, four PHP versions behind, and a regulated product that could not stop shipping. We modernised it in place, two weeks at a time.
- Change lead time
- 11 days → 0.8 days
- Clinical path coverage
- 0% → 94%
Tell us what is not working.
An hour on a call, no charge and no deck. We will tell you honestly whether this is work we are good at — and if it is not, who to talk to instead.
- Reply within
- One working day
- First call
- One hour, free
- Notice period
- One month, either way
- Based in
- Copenhagen & Odense