Services · Due diligence
Scalar Labs runs technical due diligence for investors, acquirers, boards and founders: a straight answer on what the technology is, what it will carry, and what it will cost to keep. Short engagements with written findings you can act on without us.
Four things, weighted to the deal at hand. The architecture, and whether it will carry the plan being funded. The code and the delivery practice around it, because a clean repo with no way of shipping is still a problem. The infrastructure and what it actually costs to run. And the team, including the question that gets avoided: how much of the system lives in one person's head.
The findings arrive written down, in language a board can act on, with the severe items separated from the cosmetic ones. We have sat on the founder's side of these calls, so the advice accounts for the budget and the deadline as well as the architecture.
For: leadership teams and investors who need a straight technical answer.
Before a raise, after one, or when a build has drifted far enough from its dates that the board wants an outside reading. The engagement is short by design and scoped up front: access agreed, questions listed, a written report at the end. The same work also runs in smaller forms: an architecture review before a rebuild, a build versus buy decision, or a roadmap held up against the resourcing that is supposed to deliver it.
The same families of risk turn up: hidden technical debt behind a confident roadmap; key-person risk, where one departure stalls the platform; security and compliance gaps; performance claims that have never been tested at the promised scale; licence exposure inside the dependency tree; and roadmaps the current team cannot staff.
Investors ahead of a term sheet, boards who have stopped trusting the dates, acquirers, and founders who want the exercise run on their own company before someone else runs it. That last one is the cheapest version to commission, and the findings arrive while there is still time to act on them.
Two weeks and a fixed fee, agreed before we start. For a software business the fee lands between A$12,000 and A$25,000, set by the size and state of what we are reading; larger or unusual targets are scoped on a call. The written report and a walkthrough of it are the deliverable.
Most of the work is reading: the code, the infrastructure, the tickets, the deploy history. The conversations that follow are short and specific.
That is the commissioning party's call, and we agree it before starting. We encourage sharing at least the substance, so the engineering team can act on it.
A bad report is rarely a dead deal. Findings usually put a price on a risk; the report flags the ones that threaten the deal itself. Either way you get the same output: a clear reading of the technology and what it will cost to fix.
Client work is confidential as a rule, so you'll find sectors here rather than names. We can go into specifics on a call, and put you in touch with references.
Built the platform for an education technology company, then stayed on through their first fundraising rounds while investors examined what they were backing.
Technical lead for an Australian legal tech platform: architecture, an AI pipeline, and delivery from first commit to a production MVP.
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