The Technical Due Diligence Checklist for Series A

Investors Will Look Under the Hood

Series A investors are increasingly running technical due diligence before writing checks. They've been burned by companies with impressive demos built on duct tape. If your technical foundation can't survive scrutiny, your valuation will suffer — or the deal won't close.

Here's what they're looking for and how to prepare.

The Four Pillars of Technical Due Diligence

1. Architecture & Scalability

What they ask:

• "Walk me through your architecture diagram"
• "What happens when you 10x your current traffic?"
• "Where are the single points of failure?"

What they're really asking: Can this system grow with the business, or will it need a rewrite at Series B?

How to prepare:

✅ Have an up-to-date architecture diagram
✅ Know your current scale numbers (requests/sec, DB size, user count)
✅ Identify your scaling bottlenecks honestly
✅ Have a plan for the next 10x (even if you don't need it yet)
✅ Document your technology choices and why you made them

❌ Don't pretend you have no technical debt
❌ Don't claim "infinite scalability" — nobody believes it
❌ Don't hide known issues — they'll find them

2. Engineering Team & Process

What they ask:

• "How do you ship code to production?"
• "What's your deployment frequency?"
• "How do you handle incidents?"

Key metrics to have ready:

3. Security & Compliance

What they ask:

• "Have you had a security audit?"
• "How do you handle customer data?"
• "What's your incident response plan?"

Minimum requirements:

Authentication & Authorization:
  ✅ Multi-factor authentication for admin access
  ✅ Role-based access control
  ✅ API keys rotated regularly
  ✅ Session management with proper expiry

Data Protection:
  ✅ Encryption at rest and in transit
  ✅ PII handling documented
  ✅ Backup and recovery tested
  ✅ Data retention policy defined

Infrastructure:
  ✅ Secrets management (not in code)
  ✅ Dependency vulnerability scanning
  ✅ Access logs and audit trails
  ✅ Incident response runbook

4. Technical Debt & Risk

What they ask:

• "What would you rebuild if you could start over?"
• "What's the biggest technical risk to the business?"
• "What's slowing your team down?"

How to present technical debt honestly:

Debt Item: Monolithic payment processing
Impact: Can't add new payment methods without 2-week sprint
Risk: Medium (current methods work, but limits expansion)
Plan: Extract payment service in Q3 (4-week project)
Cost to fix: ~$40k in engineering time

Debt Item: No automated testing for checkout flow
Impact: Manual QA takes 2 days per release
Risk: High (checkout bugs directly impact revenue)
Plan: Add E2E tests in next sprint (2-week project)
Cost to fix: ~$15k in engineering time

Investors respect honesty about debt. They don't respect surprises.

The Pre-Diligence Audit

Run this yourself before investors do:

Week 1: Documentation Sprint

• Architecture diagram (current state, not aspirational)
• Data flow diagram showing how customer data moves
• Deployment pipeline documentation
• Incident response runbook
• Technology decision log (ADRs)

Week 2: Metrics Collection

• Deployment frequency for last 90 days
• Incident log with resolution times
• Test coverage report
• Dependency audit (outdated packages, known vulnerabilities)
• Infrastructure cost breakdown

Week 3: Security Review

• Run automated security scan (Snyk, Dependabot)
• Review access controls and permissions
• Verify secrets management
• Check backup and recovery procedures
• Document compliance requirements and status

Week 4: Team Assessment

• Org chart with clear ownership areas
• Skills matrix (what the team can and can't do)
• Hiring plan for next 12 months
• On-call rotation and escalation procedures

What Kills Deals

We've seen Series A deals fall apart over:

1. No version control discipline — direct commits to main, no code review
2. Single point of failure people — one engineer who knows everything
3. No monitoring — "we find out about outages from customers"
4. Undisclosed security incidents — investors always find out
5. Massive hidden technical debt — the "rewrite" that nobody mentioned

The Outcome

Companies that prepare for technical due diligence don't just close better deals — they build better companies. The audit process forces you to confront the things you've been avoiding.

Every item on this checklist makes your company more valuable, whether or not you're raising. The investors are just the forcing function.