Architecture Review
Scalability: Can the system handle 10x current load?
Security: Are there OWASP top-10 vulnerabilities?
Data architecture: Is the data model well-designed?
API design: Is there a clear, versioned API?
Monitoring: Is there observability (logs, metrics, traces)?
Engineering Team Assessment
Commit velocity (GitDealFlow): How fast does the team ship?
Contributor growth (GitDealFlow): Is the team scaling?
Code quality: Review a sample of recent pull requests
Tech stack: Is it appropriate for the problem?
Developer experience: Are CI/CD, testing, and deployment automated?
Technical Debt Assessment
How much technical debt exists? Is it documented?
Is the team proactively refactoring or just adding features?
What's the on-call rotation and incident response?
Are there single points of failure in the team (bus factor)?
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 Technical Due Diligence Checklist for VC 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 Technical Due Diligence Checklist for VC 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 Technical Due Diligence Checklist for VC 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can non-technical investors do tech DD?
Yes, with a technical advisor. Use GitDealFlow for the engineering velocity assessment, it's an objective, non-technical-required signal.