Unresolved IP
Early freelancer or agency work with no written assignment. The code you are raising on may not legally be yours yet.
Tech Due Diligence
Know what investors will find before they start looking.
Technical due diligence is a human assessment, not a code scan. Before your next round, I run the audit your investors will run: people, process, and technology, against the benchmarks they actually use. You get the findings, and the time to fix them, before anyone opens the data room.
Why Now
The audit happens either way. The only question is who runs it first.
When you started, speed was everything. Now a simple feature takes weeks to ship, your lead engineers are flat out, and the only answer on the table is more headcount. That is what technical debt looks like from the outside, and it is exactly what an investor’s technical advisor is paid to find.
Most rounds do not stall on code quality. They stall on hygiene: a freelancer who never signed an IP assignment, a copyleft license buried in the dependency tree, a production system nobody can observe, a team where one person holds every key. Each of these is cheap to fix in month one and expensive to explain at term-sheet stage.
You do not need a full-time CTO to get through this. You need someone who has sat on the engineering side of the table, knows what the diligence team will ask, and can get you ready in weeks rather than quarters.
If you are raising Seed to Series B in the next six months, your data room is already being judged. Run the audit before they do.
Process
How the Audit Runs
Six steps over one to two weeks, most of them in conversation with your team rather than alone with your repository.
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Investor Alignment
Where an investor is already at the table, I talk to them first: thesis, timeline, growth expectations. The audit then answers their questions, not generic ones.
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Founder Transparency
Expectations set with you up front. The audit is a tool for closing the round, not a threat to your team. Nothing reaches the report that we have not discussed.
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Asset Review
Codebase, data models, infrastructure, contracts, compliance records, and whatever documentation exists. Read, not scanned.
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The Human Layer
Interviews with your engineering leads and key engineers. Team dynamics, how decisions get made, where knowledge lives in one head, and which roles the next stage needs.
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Whiteboard Sessions
Your team draws the live system, data flows included. The architecture that exists today, not the diagram from the last deck.
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Production Under Load
A walk through your real monitoring dashboards and incident history, to verify what the system does under actual stress rather than what the slides say.
Red Flags
What Stalls a Round
Six findings that come up again and again in institutional diligence. The audit looks for each one, documents it, and gives you a fix in priority order.
Licensing and Data Exposure
Copyleft open-source licenses in the dependency tree, and personal data handled outside what GDPR allows.
Organizational Gaps
Roles the next stage requires that nobody holds today, and systems only one person can operate.
Debt That Slows Delivery
Early shortcuts measured by what they cost now: how long a simple feature takes to reach production.
Legacy or Fringe Stack
Languages and frameworks that make hiring slow and expensive, or that only the original author can maintain.
Quality Versus Speed
Unstable release cadences, missing tests where they matter, and outages nobody wrote up.
Deliverable
What You Walk Away With
Raising
For founders raising Seed to Series B in the next three to six months.
- A written report your board can read and your data room can hold
- A remediation plan in priority order, with effort estimates
- A one-page technical summary in the language investors use
- A follow-up session once the fixes are in
Acquiring or Investing
For buyers and investors who need someone else’s technology stress-tested before the money moves.
- The same six-step audit, run on the target
- Findings framed as deal risks, with the cost to fix each one
- A view on the team you would be acquiring, not only the code
- Under NDA, on the buyer’s timeline
Fixed price, agreed before we start and scoped on the diagnostic call. No hourly billing, no open-ended engagement.
Proof
The Engineering Side of the Table
I have led engineering for a decade at Zendesk, Dutchie, and Hivenet, through funding rounds, SOC2 audits, and enterprise security reviews. The audit is built from what those rooms actually ask.
- Years leading engineering teams
- 10+
- Engineers hired and mentored
- 50+
- Daily requests scaled
- 10M+
After the Audit
When the Finding Is a Build Problem
Some findings are governance: contracts, process, roles. Those I fix with you as your fractional CTO. Others are engineering: a rewrite that cannot wait, an AI layer the product needs, a platform that has to exist before the round. Those go to The Audacity, the studio side of this practice, which runs fixed-price, fixed-deadline Studio Sprints from the audit’s specification.
Questions
Common Questions
How long does it take?
One to two weeks from kickoff to report, depending on the size of the codebase and how quickly your team is available for interviews. The report is written to be read in an hour.
What access do you need?
Read access to the repositories, the infrastructure and monitoring dashboards, and whatever documentation and contracts you have. Everything runs under NDA and nothing leaves the engagement.
What does it cost?
A fixed price agreed before we start, scoped on the diagnostic call from the size of the codebase and the team. No hourly billing.
Is this a code audit?
A code review is one input, not the audit. Most findings that stall a round are about IP, licensing, people, and process. A scanner will not find a missing freelancer contract.
We are not raising. Is it still useful?
Yes. The same audit works as a technical health check before hiring a CTO, before committing to a large build, or on the buy side when you are acquiring or investing in a company.
What if the audit finds something serious?
Then you found it first, with time to fix it. The report comes with a remediation plan in priority order. What cannot be fixed before the round gets documented honestly, which investors respect far more than a surprise.
Next Step
Raising in the Next Six Months?
Do not leave the technical audit to your investors. Thirty minutes on a call, and an honest answer on whether the audit is worth running for you.
Prefer writing first? Use the contact form. Looking for ongoing leadership instead? See how fractional CTO engagements work.