Commercial
- Who are your ten largest customers and what share of revenue do they represent?
- What is your logo and revenue churn by cohort, not blended?
- Which channel produced your last twenty customers, and at what cost?
- What happens to the customer if they stop using you tomorrow?
Financial
- Show cash collected against revenue recognised for the last eight quarters.
- What is fully loaded CAC and gross-margin payback by segment?
- Which costs are committed for the next twelve months and which are discretionary?
- What does the plan assume about price, and when did you last raise it?
Technical and product
- What breaks first at ten times current load?
- What is your dependency on any single vendor or model provider?
- How much of the roadmap is maintenance versus new capability?
- Who is the single point of failure on the engineering team?
Legal, data and team
- Is IP fully assigned by every founder, employee and contractor?
- What personal data do you process, on what lawful basis, and where does it live?
- Are there outstanding safes, notes, side letters or verbal commitments?
- Who has left in the last twelve months and why?
What a good answer looks like
Specific, sourced and unflattering where the truth is unflattering. A founder who volunteers the weak cohort before being asked buys credibility for every other number in the pack. A founder who is discovered hiding it loses credibility for all of them at once.
Prepare answers in the data room rather than in the meeting. The full eighteen-point version of this list, with the evidence each item requires, is in our diligence checklist.
Part of a guide
Investment due diligence: a complete guide
A complete guide to investment due diligence: the workstreams, the questions investors ask, the red flags that matter, the data room, and how findings become a defensible memo.