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    Pre Due Diligence

    Pre due diligence is fixing the financial, legal and operational gaps an investor will find, before the investor starts looking rather than while they are looking.

    Service within Venture Capital & Private Equity

    How we help with Pre Due Diligence

    Fundraises rarely fail in diligence. They fail before it.

    1. Run the diligence on yourself first

      The same financial, legal and operational examination an investor will run, conducted early, by people who have sat on the other side of it.

    2. Rank what is found by what it will cost

      Not every gap is worth fixing before a process. Some change the valuation, some change the timeline, and some genuinely do not matter.

    3. Fix what can be fixed

      Reconciliations, contracts, registers, cap table and revenue recognition, corrected while there is no counterparty waiting.

    4. Prepare the answer for what cannot

      Every business has something awkward in its history. A prepared, documented explanation is a footnote; the same fact discovered by a buyer is a renegotiation.

    More services within Venture Capital & Private Equity

    Before the investor examines your business, examine it yourself.

    Think of Pre-DD as a health check for a company. Seven systems, examined before anyone else gets to.

    Diagnostic read · 7 systems
    1. 01Financial

      Whether the books, revenue recognition and cash reconcile, and whether the numbers you show investors bridge to the accounts.

    2. 02Tax

      Whether GST, TDS and income tax filings are complete and current, and where open notices or tax positions carry exposure.

    3. 03Legal

      Whether contracts, IP ownership, the cap table and shareholder agreements are documented, current and consistent with each other.

    4. 04Commercial

      How concentrated revenue is across customers, what the key contracts commit to, and how defensible the business model is.

    5. 05Operations

      Whether core processes and internal controls work as described, and where the business depends on a single supplier, system or partner.

    6. 06People

      How much rests on a few key people, whether employment terms are in writing, and whether ESOP grants are properly documented.

    7. 07Technology

      Which systems the business runs on, how its data is secured, and who actually owns the code and the data.

    Where we have done this

    SaaS

    Scaling a SaaS Platform to Series B

    Built the finance basics and the investor story that helped a software company serving one industry raise growth money from large funds.

    3.2x ARR growth in 18 months

    Consumer / D2C

    Building Investor Readiness for a D2C Brand

    Designed unit economics, cohort analytics, and a fundraising data room that anchored the next funding round.

    Closed oversubscribed Series A

    FinTech

    Compliance and Governance Reset for a FinTech

    Rebuilt the compliance, secretarial, and reporting stack to meet regulator expectations ahead of a strategic partnership.

    Cleared regulatory review on first pass

    FAQ

    Questions founders ask about Pre Due Diligence

    What is pre due diligence?

    It is running the examination on yourself before an investor or acquirer runs it on you, so problems are found and fixed while there is still time and no counterparty is watching.

    Why not just wait for the real diligence?

    Because the cost of a finding rises sharply once a process has started. The same issue that takes a week to fix quietly becomes a valuation adjustment, a delayed close or a withdrawn offer when a buyer finds it.

    How is it different from an audit?

    An audit gives an opinion on the financial statements. Pre due diligence looks at everything a buyer looks at, which includes contracts, the cap table, statutory filings, customer concentration and the operating model, and it is designed to find problems rather than to certify.

    When should we do it?

    Three to six months before a process, which is enough time to remediate. Companies that do it four weeks out get a good list and no time to act on it.

    What our research says about Pre Due Diligence

    A gap an investor discovers tends to become a price discussion. The same gap, disclosed and explained by management, is far more often treated as a known item than as a reason to renegotiate.

    CA Mallavarjalla Mounika, in Don't wait for the investor to find the problems. Find and fix them before the investor does.

    The investor was not introducing new problems into the deal. They were surfacing problems that already existed inside the company, that nobody had looked at carefully, and that the founder did not realize were going to matter at this scale of conversation.

    CA Mallavarjalla Mounika, in Fundraises Don't Fail in DD: They Fail Before It

    The most expensive moment in a fundraise is rarely the rejection at the end. It is the quiet moment, somewhere in the middle of due diligence, when an investor's confidence starts to slip.

    CA Mallavarjalla Mounika, in Why Investors Lose Confidence Mid-Process

    What causes delay, renegotiation and occasionally a dead deal is almost never the company's performance.

    Sriram Chidambaram, in Diligence readiness: what we check, and what we find

    Guides and downloads on Pre Due Diligence

    E-books and masterclass material from the SRF library, free to download.

    The people behind Pre Due Diligence

    Pre Due Diligence is run by the studio team: one multidisciplinary team whose pods work in tandem, matched to the sector and the stage the company is in.

    CA Mallavarjalla Mounika

    Due Diligence pod

    Led by CA Mallavarjalla Mounika

    Lead - Due Diligence & Assurance. Assesses risks and investment readiness.

    See the pod structure
    Studio TeamThe operators, investors and builders who run engagements end to end.Meet them

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