Architectural Audits

When companies come to us

A VC or PE fund is evaluating a target company and needs an independent technical assessment before committing capital. The fund's partners can read a P&L, but they need someone who can tell them whether the platform will survive 10x growth, whether the security posture is defensible, and whether the team's velocity claims match the codebase reality.

A founder is preparing for Series A or B and wants to proactively identify and remediate technical debt before it becomes a due diligence finding. Smart founders know that a negative technical finding at the diligence stage doesn't just lower the valuation — it can kill the deal entirely.

An engineering leader has inherited a large codebase (acquisition, reorg, new hire) and needs an objective, structured assessment of what they're working with before they can plan the next 12 months. Internal teams are too close to the code to see the systemic patterns.

What the audit covers

Our audits are structured, comprehensive, and designed to be read by both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Every audit follows a consistent framework, but the depth of each section is calibrated to the specific risks of the target system.

• Executive summary: 3–5 page overview suitable for board-level consumption. Risk rating (green/yellow/red) for each major dimension. Key findings and recommended actions with estimated effort
• Architecture review: system topology, service boundaries, data flow analysis, dependency mapping, scalability assessment under projected growth scenarios
• Code quality assessment: static analysis results, test coverage analysis, complexity metrics, adherence to language/framework idioms, technical debt inventory with severity classification
• Security posture: authentication and authorization model review, data handling practices, secrets management, dependency vulnerability scan, OWASP Top 10 compliance assessment
• Infrastructure and operations: deployment pipeline review, monitoring and alerting coverage, disaster recovery capabilities, infrastructure cost analysis and optimization opportunities
• Scalability assessment: load testing results (when access permits), bottleneck identification, database query analysis, caching strategy review, projected infrastructure costs at 5x and 10x current load
• Team and process: development workflow analysis, code review practices, documentation coverage, knowledge concentration risk (bus factor analysis)
• Risk-prioritized remediation plan: every finding mapped to effort, impact, and urgency. Sequenced into 30/60/90-day action plan with estimated engineering effort in person-weeks

Engagement model

Audits are fixed-scope, fixed-price engagements. No retainers, no open-ended billing. We scope the engagement upfront based on the size and complexity of the target system.

• Focused audit (2–3 weeks): single application or service. Typical for seed/Series A companies with one core product. Deliverable: 100–150 pages
• Comprehensive audit (4–6 weeks): multi-service architecture, multiple codebases, or platform with significant infrastructure complexity. Typical for Series B+ or pre-acquisition diligence. Deliverable: 150–250 pages
• Ongoing advisory: some clients retain us for quarterly check-ins after the initial audit to track remediation progress and assess new technical decisions. Billed monthly, typically 2–4 days per quarter

How we work

We begin with a kickoff call to understand the business context, growth trajectory, and specific concerns driving the audit. This is not a checkbox exercise — understanding what matters to the stakeholders determines where we focus our depth.

We require read-only access to the codebase (GitHub/GitLab), CI/CD pipeline, infrastructure dashboards, and error tracking tools. We do not need production database access. We work from our own environments and do not install anything in your infrastructure.

Mid-engagement, we deliver a preliminary findings briefing — a 30-minute call where we share the high-level risk assessment and any critical findings that warrant immediate attention. This ensures no surprises in the final report.

The final deliverable is a structured document (PDF + source), not a slide deck. It is designed to be a reference document that the engineering team will use for months after delivery, not a one-time presentation.

What makes our audits different

We have conducted audits across mobile, web, and backend systems in fintech, retail, pharma, and enterprise SaaS. This cross-domain experience means we recognize patterns that specialists in a single vertical might miss.

Our CTO, Bohdan Marchuk, personally leads or reviews every audit engagement. His background includes 12+ years of hands-on engineering across native iOS, React Native, and full-stack web platforms — he reads code, not just reports about code. As an IEEE Senior Member and published author on mobile architecture, he brings a level of technical credibility that matters when the report needs to withstand scrutiny from a target company's engineering team.

Every finding includes a remediation estimate in person-weeks, not vague recommendations. Investors and founders can map our findings directly to budget and timeline impact.

Sample engagement

A European venture fund was evaluating a Series B fintech company processing payments in 14 markets. The fund needed to understand whether the platform could scale to 50 markets without a full rewrite, and whether the security architecture would withstand regulatory scrutiny in new jurisdictions.

We conducted a 4-week comprehensive audit covering the core payments platform (Node.js/PostgreSQL), the consumer mobile apps (React Native), and the internal operations dashboard (React/Next.js). The audit identified 23 findings across 4 severity levels, including a critical authentication bypass in the internal API and a database schema design that would have required a full migration at approximately 3x current transaction volume.

The fund proceeded with the investment at an adjusted valuation that reflected the remediation cost. The target company used our remediation plan to prioritize their next two quarters of engineering work, resolving all critical and high-severity findings before the next funding round.