If a raise or sale is on your horizon, the work to become “investment-ready” starts long before the term sheet. Here’s a 90-day plan to get your SaaS platform through technical due diligence cleanly — and protect your valuation.
Why readiness protects your valuation
Investors and acquirers don’t expect perfection. They expect founders who understand their risks and have a credible plan. The fastest way to lose value — or a deal — is to have avoidable problems discovered for you during diligence: unassigned IP, undocumented architecture, security gaps, or critical knowledge locked in one person’s head. Find and fix them first.
Days 0–30: establish the truth
- Commission an independent assessment (or run an honest internal one): architecture, code quality, security, scalability, technical debt.
- Confirm IP ownership. Verify every contractor and employee has assigned IP in writing. This is the single most common deal-killer — and it’s fixable with the right agreements.
- Inventory your stack and dependencies, flagging anything end-of-life or carrying known vulnerabilities.
Days 30–60: close the obvious gaps
- Document the architecture — a clear system diagram and data flows. Reviewers reward clarity.
- Fix high-severity security issues and write down your security posture and roadmap.
- Reduce key-person risk — document critical operations and cross-train, so no single resignation is catastrophic.
- Tidy the repository — remove secrets from code, document the build and release process.
Days 60–90: build the data room
- Assemble a technical data room: architecture docs, security policies, IP assignments, dependency/licence list, incident history, and your roadmap.
- Prepare a one-page technical narrative for investors: what you’ve built, why it scales, and how you manage risk.
- Have a prioritised remediation roadmap ready — showing reviewers you know your gaps and have a plan signals maturity.
The red flags to eliminate first
Across deals, the recurring valuation-killers are: unassigned contractor IP, open-source licensing traps, key-person dependency, fragile manual deployments, and security issues the founders can’t explain. Clearing these four or five items does more for your deal than almost anything else.
Frequently asked questions
How long does technical due diligence take?
Most mid-market deals run 30–90 days. Good preparation — a clean data room and resolved IP — meaningfully shortens it.
Should we run our own due diligence before a raise?
Yes. A founder-commissioned independent assessment lets you fix issues on your terms, before an investor finds them on theirs.
What if we find serious problems?
Better now than mid-deal. A prioritised remediation plan, underway, is far more reassuring to investors than a platform with hidden surprises.
Planning a raise or sale? See our independent technical due diligence service or request a fixed-price readiness assessment.