Technical Due Diligence Checklist for Investors and Founders

When a startup raises a Series A funding round or prepares for an acquisition, the investors or acquiring company will conduct a technical due diligence audit. This process evaluates the startup's technology assets, database security, codebase quality, and hosting infrastructure.

Many deals fall through or face valuation cuts because the technical audit reveals poorly structured databases, license violations, or security vulnerabilities.

This guide provides a technical due diligence checklist to help founders prepare their technology assets for audit and help investors evaluate target codebases.

1. Database Architecture & Data Isolation Audits

• Tenant Isolation Verification: If the platform is a multi-tenant SaaS, verify how customer data is isolated. Do queries rely on application code filters (which are prone to developer coding errors), or does the database enforce strict isolation using PostgreSQL Row-Level Security (RLS) policies?
• PII Encryption Audit: Check if sensitive customer details (like social security numbers, bank details, or API tokens) are encrypted in the database using strong encryption standards (like AES-256-GCM) with key management procedures.
• Backup and Recovery Tests: Verify that automated, incremental backups are active and stored in secure, write-once-read-many (WORM) storage locations. Check if the team runs periodic recovery drills to test backup integrity.
• Audit Logging: Check for the presence of immutable audit logs that track administrative reads and edits to sensitive customer records.

2. Codebase Quality & Dependency Reviews

• License Compliance Checks: Audit all open-source packages in the codebase. Verify the team does not use libraries with restrictive licenses (like GPL or AGPL) in proprietary modules, which can force your business to open-source your entire application code.
• Vulnerability Scans: Run dependency scanners (like npm audit or Snyk) to identify out-of-date packages containing known security vulnerabilities.
• TypeScript & Typing Audits: Verify the application codebase uses strict typing (like TypeScript) to prevent runtime errors and keep the system maintainable.
• Deployment Automation: Ensure the team uses automated pipelines (like GitHub Actions) to run test scripts and handle server deployments, avoiding manual uploads.

3. Infrastructure & Hosting Cost Reviews

• Compute Resource Utilization: Check if the startup is overspending on cloud databases or virtual servers. Identify unused databases or non-optimized queries that inflate hosting costs.
• Secrets Management Check: Audit how database credentials, API keys, and private keys are stored. They must be managed using secure vault systems (like AWS Secrets Manager) rather than hardcoded in the codebase or version control files.

4. Technical Due Diligence Audit Matrix

| Audit Category | Key Technical Checkpoint | Target Standard | Primary Risk Mitigated | |---|---|---|---| | Data Isolation | PostgreSQL RLS review | DB-level isolation rules | Cross-tenant data leaks | | IP Protection | Code license audit | Permissive licenses only (MIT/Apache) | Proprietary code exposure | | Infrastructure | Secrets vault review | Encrypted secret managers | Server compromise via leaked keys | | DevOps Code | Automated test pipelines | 80%+ unit test coverage | Buggy releases and operational downtime | | Security | Dependency check | Zero active high CVSS vulnerabilities | System hacks via legacy libraries |

Prepare Your Startup for Audit with Trustoryx

At Trustoryx, we help founders prepare for technical audits and assist investors in conducting codebase reviews. Our engineering teams, led by post-graduate security researchers, audit databases, identify dependency risks, check IP ownership, and optimize hosting setups to ensure your systems are audit-ready.

We design clean, secure, and compliant systems.

Contact us today to schedule a technical due diligence audit for your company.