Ground Truth — For Private Equity

Know what you're buying. Before you close.

Technical due diligence in hours or days, not weeks or months. Faster and materially lower-cost than traditional diligence, with findings grounded in what's actually running.

The Problem

Traditional tech diligence is slow, expensive, and inconsistent.

You're relying on weeks or months of consultant time, a handful of interviews, and management-prepared narrative to assess technology that will determine whether your thesis holds.

Traditional Technical DD
  • 6–12 weeks of engagement time
  • High fees, variable scope, and change-order risk
  • Findings depend on who you happen to hire
  • Management decks and interviews drive the narrative
  • Hidden liabilities found post-close — when it's too late
  • Inconsistent depth across portfolio companies
  • No ongoing monitoring capability
Ground Truth
  • Report delivered in hours or days
  • Materially faster and lower-cost than traditional diligence
  • Same analytical framework on every deal
  • Management claims checked against what is actually in code and cloud
  • Surface hidden liabilities while you can still negotiate
  • Consistent baseline across every portfolio company
  • Repeat for ongoing portfolio health monitoring
Deliverables

Three outputs, aligned to three audiences.

Every engagement produces separate outputs for the deal team, the operating leadership, and the incoming technical owner.

For the Deal Team

PE Due Diligence Brief

  • Technology risk rating with justification
  • Identified liabilities with estimated remediation cost
  • Security exposures that create deal risk
  • Cloud cost structure vs. industry benchmarks
  • Architecture assessment: scalability, coupling, brittleness
  • Recommended DD questions to ask management
  • Negotiation leverage points from findings
Formatted for IC presentation and LP reporting.
For the CEO / CFO

Executive Brief

  • What the business is actually running (vs. what they think)
  • Where technology spend is going and why
  • Cloud cost breakdown with savings opportunities
  • What's slowing the engineering team and why
  • Prioritized action list: 30/60/90 day view
  • What to fix first to reduce operational risk
12–15 pages. Written for business leaders, not engineers.
For the New CTO / CPTO

Technical Deep Dive

  • Actual architecture diagrams generated from code
  • Security vulnerability map (API keys, exposure points)
  • Service coupling analysis and cascade failure risk
  • Dead code, technical debt quantification
  • Dependency mapping and version risk
  • Team velocity inhibitors identified in the codebase
The onboarding document every incoming CTO wishes they had.
What We Read

Read-only inputs. Claims checked against reality.

We read directly from the codebase, cloud environment, schema documentation, and the management materials you already have. Management decks are useful context, but not the source of truth. We treat their claims as assertions to verify against what is actually deployed and running.

GitHub
Full codebase, commit history, PRs
AWS / Cloud
Cost Explorer, resource inventory
Database
Schema dump, table structure
Management Decks
Claims, architecture slides, and operating narrative to validate
Config & Infra
Environment files, IaC, dependencies
Ground Truth Engine

Seasoned human operators backed by 100+ concurrent read-only AI agents. The agents do the broad crawl; experienced humans review, validate, and turn the output into something investment teams can trust.

PE Due Diligence Brief
Risk summary, deal implications, negotiation leverage points
Executive Brief
CEO/CFO summary, cost exposure, strategic risk
Technical Deep Dive
Architecture diagrams, code quality, security findings
Read-only, always. The access model is equivalent to an outside audit: no writes, no production changes, and no dependence on internal documentation quality or management storytelling.
Findings Pattern

What tends to surface

These are the categories that show up repeatedly when we test the management narrative against the actual system.

Cloud Spend
30%+

Average cloud overspend identified. Unused resources, over-provisioned instances, and duplicated services that have accumulated over years.

Security Exposure
API↗

API keys, credentials, and secrets committed directly to production code. Found in most codebases. Creates breach liability and compliance exposure.

Architecture Risk
Hi-C

Tightly coupled services that cause cascade failures. A change in one component breaks three others — and the team often doesn't know why until it's in production.

Technical Debt
40%

Average portion of codebase that is dead code, deprecated dependencies, or untested paths. Directly impacts engineering velocity and hire-ramp time.

Compliance Readiness
SOC2

SOC 2, ISO 27001, and NIST AI framework gap analysis mapped to actual code and infrastructure. Critical for regulated sector acquisitions.

Scalability
∞?

Whether the current architecture can handle 10x the current load — and what breaks first if it can't. Informs post-acquisition growth planning.

Sample Output

See the PE due diligence brief format

The sample output shows the report structure: executive summary, risk scorecard, key findings, cloud cost analysis, architecture map, and prioritized action list.

Ground Truth · PE Due Diligence Brief
Technology Risk Assessment
Acme Commerce Inc.
~420K lines
Confidential
Overall
6.4
Security
8.1
Architecture
6.8
Scalability
3.2
17 live credentials committed to source code
Critical security and PCI-DSS exposure
Checkout service is a single point of failure
Revenue reliability risk with known incident history
$280K–$340K annualized cloud waste identified
Direct EBITDA improvement with no product changes
Prioritized action list and management questions
Pre-close conditions, Day 1 savings, 90-day roadmap
The Process

Minimal access. Human-led. Delivered in hours or days.

01Access

Read-only credentials

GitHub read-only token, AWS Cost Explorer read access, and a database dump. Your IT coordinator handles setup in under an hour.

02Analysis

100+ AI agents deployed

Hundreds of purpose-built agents run concurrently across the codebase and cloud infrastructure — architecture mapping, security scanning, cost analysis, dependency analysis, and more.

03Synthesis

Seasoned human operator review

Seasoned senior operators review every agent finding before it goes in the report. The agents are the force multiplier; experienced humans validate, pressure-test, and contextualize the output.

04Delivery

Briefing + reports

You receive a PE Due Diligence Brief, an Executive Summary, and a Technical Deep Dive — plus a live briefing with our team.

“I've been wondering how this worked for two years since I got here. It diagrammed it better than I would have.”
Senior engineer, post-acquisition technical review
Get Started

See what's actually in your next deal.

A 30-minute briefing is enough to know whether Ground Truth is the right fit for your current pipeline.