What you are buying, stated plainly.

The code was fine.
The team had left.

A plain-language verdict on whether the technology can support the plan, with the three things most likely to cost money after close.

What the system does, what breaks first as volume grows, and what the ceiling costs to lift.

Where understanding is concentrated, who is load-bearing, and what happens to delivery if they leave in the first year.

Reachable vulnerabilities, secret handling, access control and licence obligations that affect commercial use.

What has to be fixed, in what order, and roughly what it costs in engineering weeks over the first hundred days.

Anything with a valuation or warranty implication, flagged separately so it reaches the people negotiating.

Before an acquisition, where the plan depends on the technology supporting growth the current team never had to deliver.

A round where the engineering claim in the deck needs independent verification against the codebase.

Finding what a buyer will find, early enough to fix it or price it rather than be surprised by it.

The deal is done and the first hundred days need a technical plan grounded in what actually exists.

An existing holding where delivery has slowed and the board wants an independent read on why.

Buying a supplier or a product line, where integration cost is most of the real price.

Every line read,inside a deal timeline.

Not a sample of the codebase

Every repository, service and configuration read. Sampling is how a report concludes the code is sound and misses the module that carries all the risk.

Exposure mapped to usage

Dependency licences traced to where they are actually used, so a copyleft obligation in the commercial path is found rather than buried in a list of four hundred packages.

Who knows what, from the commits

Commit history analysed against current headcount to locate knowledge concentration — the risk most likely to surface after close and least likely to be in a vendor deck.

The verdict is a senior engineer’s, and it is signed.

Whether a finding is material to the deal is a judgement about the investment case, not a severity score. Every report is owned by a named engineer who will defend it to a committee.

When diligence
will not change the deal

For a business bought for its customers, contracts or brand, deep technical diligence answers a question nobody is asking.

If findings cannot affect price, warranties or the plan, the report becomes a formality rather than a decision input.

Without repository and infrastructure access this becomes an interview exercise. We will say so rather than dress it up.

Where the plan is to rebuild regardless, assess the rebuild cost rather than the quality of what is being discarded.

Price adjustments, warranties or conditions that resulted. The clearest evidence the work paid for itself.

Material issues found post-acquisition that the report missed. This is the number that judges us.

Actual cost of the first hundred days against what we projected.

Whether the people we flagged as load-bearing left, and whether the mitigation held.

Whether the system broke where and when we said it would as volume grew.

Whether the report answered the questions asked in the meeting rather than the ones we found interesting.

What diligence
leads to