The Startup Due Diligence Checklist: What to Check Before You Write the Check

Due diligence fails most often not because investors check the wrong things, but because they check them in the wrong order and skip the engineering layer entirely. This post lays out a four-workstream checklist that front-loads the cheap, public checks before the expensive legal work, with public GitHub activity as a fifth stream that reveals how fast a team is actually shipping.

Key stats

21-47 days: Median lead time of engineering acceleration ahead of a fundraise announcement (n=219 fundraises backtested in the SSRN preprint)

3.4x: Lift in a composite commit-velocity + contributor signal preceding Series A (SSRN preprint, abstract 6606558)

350+: Startup GitHub orgs tracked weekly (across 15 sectors, Q3 2026 panel)

References

[1] Engineering Acceleration as a VC Deal Flow Signal: SSRN

[2] VC Deal Flow Signal Methodology: GitDealFlow

[3] NVCA Model Legal Documents: NVCA

[4] Y Combinator Startup Library: Y Combinator