A practical checklist of the technical and engineering factors Series A investors evaluate — with specific actions to take in the 3-6 months before you start raising to ensure your technical setup doesn't kill your term sheet.
The Series A technical review isn't a deep code audit. It's a red flag check.
Most investors aren't engineers. They're not going to read your code. What they're doing — or what their technical advisor is doing — is looking for signals that the technical foundation is sound enough not to become a liability after they write the check. They're looking for evidence that you've been thoughtful, that basic things are in place, and that there are no obvious time bombs waiting to go off after funding. Once the check clears, the work shifts — our guide on the first 90 days after funding covers the technical decisions that matter most in that window.
This checklist covers every area a Series A investor is likely to examine. Work through it 3–6 months before you start raising. Anything you don't check off is either a quick fix or an important flag that tells you what to prioritise.
If you check this: Investors see a team that runs a professional development process and takes code ownership seriously.
If you don't: No version control is a fundamental red flag — it signals that code changes can't be tracked, reviewed, or safely reverted. Credentials in git history is a security failure that requires an immediate key rotation, and tells investors that basic hygiene hasn't been practiced.
Quick fix: If credentials are in git history, rotate the keys immediately. Use git filter-branch or BFG Repo Cleaner to remove them from history. Set up a .gitignore rule to prevent it happening again. Add a pre-commit hook or a secrets scanner (like git-secrets or trufflehog) to catch future commits.
npm audit, pip-audit, Dependabot alerts)If you check this: Investors see a team that takes user data seriously. In a world where data breaches destroy companies, this matters.
If you don't: Plaintext passwords or HTTP endpoints are not just investor concerns — they're incidents waiting to happen. An investor's technical advisor will check for these specifically. Finding either is a near-automatic flag that will require remediation before the deal closes.
Quick fix: HTTP to HTTPS is a configuration change, usually under an hour. Hashed passwords requires a migration — force a password reset for all users rather than trying to migrate existing plaintext passwords. Dependabot can be enabled on GitHub in five minutes and will surface vulnerabilities automatically.
If you check this: Investors see a team that won't discover a database failure via a customer complaint on Twitter. Operations maturity at this level is a signal of general engineering discipline.
If you don't: No backups is the most common finding in pre-raise audits, and it concerns investors deeply. It's not just about the risk of losing data — it's about what it signals: that basic operational thinking hasn't been applied to the product. No uptime monitoring means you're flying blind. No repeatable deployment process means the product is fragile.
Quick fix: AWS RDS, Supabase, and most managed database services have automated backup features that can be enabled in minutes. Uptime Robot has a free tier. Sentry has a free tier. These are same-day fixes. Documenting the deployment process takes an afternoon.
Independent technical assessment for investors, acquirers, and founders — a report you can put in front of a board.
If you check this: Investors see a clean IP picture with no legal ambiguity about who owns what.
If you don't: Missing IP assignment from a contractor or former co-founder is the most common legal issue that surfaces in Series A due diligence. It doesn't necessarily kill the deal, but it creates legal complexity that delays closing and gives investors negotiating leverage. GPL dependencies in a proprietary product can require a licensing fee or a code replacement.
Quick fix: IP assignment agreements are one-page documents. A startup lawyer can draft one in a day. For contractors you can still reach, get it signed retroactively — most will sign without objection. For those you can't reach, you need a legal opinion on exposure. Service accounts are an afternoon of work to migrate to company-controlled email.
If you check this: Investors see a business that isn't dependent on a single person's presence, and a team that communicates internally.
If you don't: A bus factor of 1 — where one person leaving would halt development — is one of the most cited Series A concerns. Investors have seen it happen: the check closes, the key engineer leaves, and the company spends the post-funding period rebuilding knowledge rather than executing the growth plan.
Quick fix: Knowledge concentration is the hardest item on this list to fix quickly, because it requires another engineer to actually learn the system. Start the onboarding process before you need it — bring on a second senior engineer and have them contribute to the codebase for 2–3 months before you raise. If closing the gap means bringing on an entire team at once, our guide on how to do an acquihire walks through structuring that deal and retaining the people you acquire.
If you check this: Investors see a product that can operate in regulated markets without requiring an emergency compliance project post-funding.
If you don't: GDPR violations have resulted in multi-million euro fines for companies far smaller than Series A. The risk isn't theoretical. More practically, enterprise customers and strategic partners increasingly run compliance reviews before signing — a product that can't demonstrate basic GDPR compliance or data handling practices will fail those reviews.
Quick fix: GDPR readiness for a seed-stage product isn't as daunting as it sounds. You need: a privacy policy that accurately describes what you collect and why, a way to delete user data on request, and a way to export user data on request. The technical implementation is a set of admin functions. It's not SOC 2 — it's basic user rights.
An independent, written assessment of code quality, security, and architecture — with prioritised, actionable fixes.
Days 1–30: Fix the security and legal risks
These are the items that create immediate liability and concern investors most acutely. Prioritise in this order:
Days 31–60: Add the operational layer
These are the items that show engineering maturity:
Days 61–90: Reduce key-person risk and process gaps
If that data-model review reveals the structural fixes are really a partial rebuild, our breakdown of MVP development cost for a SaaS startup helps you judge whether a rebuild quote is fair before you commit post-raise budget to it.
Reading the checklist tells you what to look for; it doesn't tell you what you actually have. If you'd rather know for certain before an investor's advisor does,
have an independent team run this audit →Investors or their technical advisors will ask questions like:
The last question is the most important. Investors respect founders who can answer it honestly and specifically — "we have a multi-tenancy issue in our data model that we need to fix in the next two quarters" — more than founders who say "we don't really have any technical risks." The former signals awareness and control. The latter signals either unawareness or evasion, neither of which is reassuring.
For a deeper view on what investors evaluate beyond the checklist, see our guide on what investors look for in your technical team. If you're preparing for a full technical due diligence process, see the technical due diligence guide.
Reading the checklist identifies what to look for. Having an independent team run it tells you what you actually have. Hunchbite conducts pre-raise technical audits — a systematic review of your codebase, infrastructure, and team setup, with a written report that tells you exactly what investors will find before they find it.
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Hunchbite runs pre-raise technical audits: a systematic review of your codebase, infrastructure, and team setup with a written report of exactly what a Series A technical advisor will flag. Book a call and we'll tell you what to fix in the 3-6 months before you start raising.
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