Technology audit & due diligence across Europe.

The Depth Behind Each Pillar

Our 5P Framework provides the structure for every assessment. Rather than a generic checklist, we evaluate each pillar in the context of your business stage, market, and ambitions. Read the full framework for detail on each pillar. For a practical overview of the ground we cover, our technology due diligence checklist sets out the key areas across all five pillars.

People: The Human Foundation

We start with People because the quality of the team determines everything else. We assess team structure, leadership depth, and whether decisions route through a single person or are shared. Key person risk is one of our most common findings: in roughly 40% of assessments, critical knowledge sits with one or two people, which directly affects valuation. In cross-border organisations, this analysis extends to cultural dynamics, language barriers in engineering teams, and whether leadership structures reflect the reality of distributed European operations. We also evaluate hiring capability and whether technology choices are creating recruitment bottlenecks in competitive markets such as Berlin, Amsterdam, or Dublin.

Process: How Work Gets Done

Process tells us whether talent and architecture translate into delivered value. We examine the full delivery pipeline: how work is prioritised, how code reaches production, and how the team learns from what it ships. Manual deployment is the single most reliable sign of broader process gaps: teams that deploy by hand almost always have weak testing, poor environment management, and limited observability. In companies with engineering teams spread across multiple European countries, we pay particular attention to how process bridges time zones, languages, and local working cultures. We look for pragmatic agile practices and continuous technical debt management, not annual "tech debt sprints."

Product: The Technology Itself

We examine architecture, code quality, and technical decisions that determine whether the platform can scale and evolve. In most assessments, we find architectural choices that will block growth within 18 months: a sync pipeline that cannot handle peak load, a schema that does not support the multi-tenancy sales are promising, or a monolith too coupled to extend safely. For European companies, we also assess data architecture against the reality of cross-border operations: where data resides, how it flows between jurisdictions, and whether architectural decisions create compliance exposure as the company grows into new markets. We also assess technology choices for pragmatism and flag unnecessary build-versus-buy decisions that drain engineering time.

Protection: Security and Compliance

No penetration testing is the single most common critical finding across all our assessments. We evaluate access control, data protection practices, and compliance posture, always calibrated to stage and jurisdiction. Whether your organisation calls it GDPR, RGPD, DSGVO, or personuppgiftslagen, the obligations are the same, but the enforcement landscape differs by member state, from the assertive stance of the Swedish IMY to the CNIL in France to the BfDI in Germany. Production data in dev environments, secrets in source control, and excessive production access appear far more often than they should. We assess whether the organisation holds the right certifications for its market and is building towards the ones it will need next. For companies in regulated industries, this extends to cybersecurity due diligence: evaluating whether security controls are genuinely effective or merely ticking boxes across multiple regulatory regimes, from BaFin to AMF to CONSOB to the FCA, AFM, FSMA, and Finansinspektionen. For a deeper look at how we approach each area, see what we assess in a technology due diligence.

Platform: The Operational Foundation

Cloud costs are almost universally neglected until they become a board-level problem. We assess Infrastructure as Code maturity, disaster recovery readiness, and monitoring coverage. Environments built by hand are not reproducible, not auditable, and not resilient. We look for tested recovery procedures with measured recovery times, and observability that lets the team detect issues before customers report them. For companies operating across European markets, we also assess data residency architecture and whether infrastructure choices support the jurisdictional requirements of each market the company serves.

AI Across Every Pillar

AI is not a separate assessment: it is woven through all five pillars. In Product, we evaluate AI capabilities, whether claims of AI differentiation stand up to scrutiny, and whether the strategy is grounded in genuine technical feasibility or marketing aspiration. In Platform, we assess AI infrastructure choices, vendor concentration risk, and whether the data foundation supports the AI ambitions. In Process, we look at AI adoption in the development workflow: are teams using AI tools effectively, or are they running pilots that never reach production? In Protection, we evaluate AI-specific risks: data governance, model bias, regulatory exposure under the EU AI Act, and whether the organisation understands the compliance landscape as it evolves. In People, we assess AI capability and depth, whether the team can build and maintain what has been promised.

Our assessors have hands-on experience building and deploying production AI systems. Our bench includes partners with PhDs in computer science and physics, published research, and patents in machine learning: people who have built the systems they now assess. This matters because AI claims are easy to make and difficult to verify without deep technical knowledge. We assess not just whether AI exists in the product, but whether it is production-grade, sustainable, and genuinely differentiated, or whether it is a thin wrapper around a third-party API that any competitor could replicate.

Patterns Across Our Assessments

Architecture constrains growth sooner than leaders expect. In most audits, we find architectural decisions that will block the company's scaling plans within 18 months: revealed by rising delivery effort, more frequent incidents, and declining team morale.

Key person dependency is endemic. 40% of the organisations we assess have critical knowledge concentrated in one or two people. The risk stays invisible until those people leave, fall ill, or become a bottleneck. In cross-border organisations, this risk compounds: when the sole expert also holds the only institutional understanding of a particular market's requirements, the exposure is doubled.

Security posture is weaker than leaders believe. The most common critical finding is no penetration testing. The pattern extends to excessive production access, secrets in source control, and no incident response procedures.

Process maturity predicts everything else. Teams with mature deployment practices almost always have better code quality, stronger security, and more resilient infrastructure. Manual deployment is a leading indicator of gaps across every pillar.

From Assessment to Action

Roughly a third of our audit clients go on to engage us for fractional CTO support to implement our recommendations. The partner who conducted the audit already understands the architecture, the team, and the root causes, so there is no ramp-up period. The transition from "here is what needs to change" to "here is how we are changing it" is seamless.

If you are preparing for a sale, our sell-side due diligence service uses the same methodology from the other side of the table, helping you identify and address what buyers will find before they arrive.

Stage-Appropriate Assessment

We do not compare a five-person seed startup to a hundred-person Series C company. We assess whether the technology organisation is where it should be for its stage and has the foundations for the next one. Whether you call it IT Due Diligence, audit IT, or audit tecnologico, the question is the same: is this technology fit for the investment thesis? The same applies across sectors: due diligence on a SaaS platform looks different from a software audit on an embedded systems company, and a digital due diligence for a marketplace requires its own lens. We calibrate our technology risk assessment to your context every time.

At seed stage, we expect speed and pragmatism: technical debt is acceptable if understood. At Series A, we look for deliberate hiring, processes that support delivery, and architecture designed for the next 12 months. At Series B and beyond, we expect autonomous teams, mature processes, proactive security, and fully automated infrastructure.

What Sets Our Assessments Apart

Operators Leading Every Engagement

Our assessors are practising CTOs who have built and scaled technology organisations. They have sat in the chair, managed the team, and answered to the board. When they assess a technology organisation, they are pattern-matching against decades of direct experience. This depth surfaces risks that standardised frameworks are not designed to find: organisational dysfunction, architecture decisions that will fail at scale, and the subtle signs a technology leader is not delivering.

Grounded in Implementation

Our recommendations come from implementation experience. When we recommend a migration or a team restructure, we know what it involves because we have done it. Every finding is grounded in operational reality, not strategic abstraction.

Independent and Comparative

We bring both independence and comparative perspective. Having assessed organisations of all sizes and stages across European markets, we know what is normal, what is exceptional, and what is genuinely concerning. That pattern recognition, built across 100+ engagements, is what separates a useful assessment from a generic one.

Cross-Border by Default

European technology organisations rarely operate in a single jurisdiction. Engineering teams in one country, data hosted in another, customers across a third. Our assessors understand this reality because they work in it every day. We assess not just whether the technology works, but whether it works across the regulatory, cultural, and operational boundaries that define European business.