Series A Due Diligence Checklist for Investors

Product

Working product with clear PMF signals (Sean Ellis >40%)

Strong retention (NDR >100%, logo churn <5%/month)

Engineering velocity data (GitDealFlow signal, sustained top-quartile commit velocity)

Product roadmap with defensible moat (proprietary tech, network effects)

Financial

$1-2M+ ARR with 15-20% MoM growth

Gross margin >70% for SaaS

LTV/CAC >3x, payback period <12 months

Runway >12 months post-round

Clean cap table (founders >40%, no toxic terms)

Market

$1B+ TAM with clear growth trajectory

Understanding of competitive landscape

GTM motion validated (sales cycle, CAC by channel)

Regulatory moat (if applicable)

Team

Full-time founding team with aligned incentives

Key hires identified for next 12 months

Reference checks (3-5, including one unsuggested)

Culture of shipping (GitDealFlow confirms via engineering velocity)

Legal

Clean IP ownership (no third-party code issues)

Proper corporate structure

Employee agreements with IP assignment

Cap table accuracy verified

How to Use This Checklist

A checklist earns its place when every line maps to evidence you can obtain. The items above follow the same public-data discipline behind GitDealFlow: 350+ startup GitHub organizations tracked across 15 sectors, refreshed weekly, with breakouts identified 21 to 47 days before the round. Where a line asks about engineering execution, the evidence is usually public: commit velocity, contributor concentration, and repository expansion, all confirmable from the repository itself rather than from a pitch deck.

Related Checklists

• GitHub due diligence checklist
• Seed due diligence checklist
• Technical due diligence checklist
• All checklists

A practical read-through of Series A Due Diligence Checklist for Investors: the dataset behind this page refreshes weekly across 350+ organizations and 15 sectors, and every figure shown traces to a public GitHub REST API pull. That matters for two reasons. Reproducibility: any number here can be re-derived from primary sources, which is the standard the published methodology sets for itself. Timeliness: engineering acceleration precedes announcements, so this page follows the data cadence rather than the news cycle, and the freshness endpoint always reports the exact pull date.

If Series A Due Diligence Checklist for Investors is your entry point, the fastest next steps are fixed: skim the glossary for the three or four terms that anchor the topic, open the research dataset to see the raw weekly snapshots behind the summary numbers, and run one live query against the free momentum checker with a company you already know well. Seeing the signal fire on a familiar name is the quickest way to judge whether code-side sourcing belongs in your own workflow.

One caveat worth stating plainly on Series A Due Diligence Checklist for Investors: momentum is a leading indicator, not a verdict. A repository can accelerate for reasons that never become a fundraise, and a quiet quarter does not mean a team is failing. The disciplined use of this page is as one input in a stack, a way to rank where scarce diligence time goes, and a way to notice change early. The methodology page documents every limitation, including the bot filter, the two-period confirmation rule, and the sectors where coverage is thinnest.