Differentiated diligence
Our unique transaction diligence works to de-risk your technology investment.
Go beyond superficial diligence to deeply understand your most valuable enterprise asset: Your product.
We help our partners to avoid risk and poor outcomes associated with hidden product, technical, and go-to-market deficiencies. Our proven maturity model works to create actionable plans that mitigate organizational gaps. Our broad-spectrum approach examines all critical areas: from the team’s leadership and culture to your product’s quality and resiliency.
$20B+
TOTAL TRANSACTION VOLUME
150+
TRANSACTIONS ADVISED
$944M
BAD DEAL AVOIDANCE
Our insights have helped our partners re-trade or avoid over $900M in deals with limiting risk factors.
DIVERSE INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE
Our unique diligence approach allows us to assess technology-enabled companies across a wide range of industry sectors.
Differentiated diligence. Value creation focus.
Pre-transaction diligence programs run a well-tested playbook and are optimized to perform under the intense time pressure of a pending transaction.
Technology Maturity & Risk
Thesis-specific inquiry and evaluation of strategy, people, process, architecture, AI/ML, reliability, and serviceability.
Our pre-transaction advisory helps clients assess targets quickly and thoroughly — all within their exclusivity window.
Our assessments help clients understand both the quality of the organization’s assets but also the maturity relative to market leaders.
Our model is built from 20+ years of battle scars designing, developing, testing, and supporting enterprise-grade software.
Open Source Risk
Automated and manual inspections to uncover security vulnerabilities and commercially unfriendly license conflicts.
99% of companies use open source, but less than half know the full inventory. What risks are you taking by using software that isn’t your own?
Open source saves time and money, but it also injects significant risk. Most codebases contain high-severity vulnerabilities and license conflicts that can introduce restrictive or viral distribution consequences.
Source Code Evaluation
Manual and automated evaluation of maintainability, onboarding, key personnel, security, and open source risks.
Code quality and technical debt directly impact your cost, uptime, and time to market. Is your codebase a liability or an asset?
A well-maintained codebase means new developers contribute faster and existing teammates are more productive. Find the key people, risky code, and productivity gaps that are driving costs and affecting growth.
Cloud Cost Optimization
Dramatically reduce cloud infrastructure spend while improving performance and availability.
We identify the most inefficient areas of your architecture across compute, storage, pipelines, and databases. We make actionable recommendations to optimize and modernize. We can even make the changes for you to avoid distracting your product teams.
We can usually save an early 10-15%, with 50+% savings potential once implementations are complete.
Integration Opinion
Perspective on interoperability and extensibility, potential product enhancement, feature rationalization, cost savings, and available synergies.
Security Risk Assessment
Comprehensive analysis of product security from both executive and technical perspectives.
Day 1 Workshop
Work with target operating executives and tech leadership to review findings, contextualize recommendations, and advise on implementation strategies.
Cloud Readiness
Ensure the product strategy and architecture are leveraging the strengths and flexibility of the cloud to maximize business value.
Sell-side Diligence & Positioning
Develop a story on tech position and trajectory that maximizes valuation. Identify and remediate gaps and defend the POV from buy-side scrutiny.
“This goes beyond the typical ‘check the box’ approach.”
- Private Equity Deal Partner
Our unique approach gives our clients the wisdom and confidence to act on technology risk.
We are strategic partners to Private Equity firms and the operating executives of leading companies. Our team is comfortable navigating the complexities of a pending transaction, working to defend enterprise value though best-in-class technology decisions.
Unlock newfound capacity and unmatched wisdom post-sign and post-close.
We enhance value across the investment lifecycle from advisory services to turn-key product development.
Beyond the transaction window, we assist through initial integration planning, ongoing executive advisory, and critical staffing for essential technology investments.
We help you create value across the entire product landscape.
From navigating complex cloud migrations to designing world-class customer experiences, we can help maximize the potential of your investment — all faster and more efficiently than you might imagine.
Transaction Advisory
Negotiation support, exhibit review, deal modeling, cost estimation, team right-sizing
Operational Risk Reduction
Technical debt reduction, cost optimization, high-availability architecture, outsourcing/offshoring
Post-Transaction Acceleration
Cloud migration strategy, prototyping & proofs-of-concept, design-driven development & analytics
DevOps & Dev Process
Increase weekly team productivity, decrease total cost of app dev, decrease contractor setup time
100% of our Private Equity clients use Kickdrum more than once.
“Before Kickdrum, I don’t think I’ve ever been happy with any tech diligence project we’ve done.”
- PE deal partner
“You and your team’s insights, guidance, hard work, and responsiveness were critical to getting this deal across the finish line.”
- PE deal partner
“This goes beyond the typical ‘check the box’ approach.”
- PE deal partner
“We went through this process before with another buyer and they didn’t raise any of these issues.”
- Recent target company
“I personally felt the quality of the written deliverables was higher than I expected.”
- Buy-side CTO
“We’re trying to do a lot more on the software side and you guys are definitely top of mind for us.”
- PE deal partner
“We certainly appreciated and enjoyed working with you and your team, and we'll definitely keep you in mind for future opportunities (I'm sure we'll have some).”
- Buy-side CTO
“It was a good experience working with you - you guys did a great job.”
- PE deal partner
“With new diligence providers. you only know 6 months after that you didn’t miss anything, but I don’t expect that to happen here.”
- PE deal partner
