Traditional M&A tech due diligence takes 2-3 months and costs $150-300K in consulting fees. Most of that time is spent doing what an AI can do in hours: mapping features, identifying technical debt, and assessing team knowledge distribution.
The Traditional Process
A typical tech due diligence engagement:
Week 1-2: Consultants get repository access. They manually review the codebase, interview engineers, and catalog features.
Week 3-6: Deep analysis. Architecture diagrams (drawn manually). Dependency mapping (done by reading code). Technical debt assessment (based on gut feeling and code smells).
Report writing. The 80-page PDF that the acquiring company's CTO will skim.