Most failed software acquisitions were readable before close.
RJP is an independent technical diligence firm for sponsors, corporate development teams, and growth investors acquiring software companies. Underperformance rarely comes from choosing the wrong target — it comes from operating-model drift the deal team never read. We read it: the codebase, the delivery history, the retention cohorts, the organization — scored against our Health Framework, with written rationale that holds up in front of an investment committee.
Three practices. One instrument.
Every engagement applies the same measurement framework at a depth set by the client's moment: a deal forming, a deal closing, or a company already owned. The scoping call matches the situation to the smallest engagement that answers it.
Transaction Diligence
Buy-side technical assessment scoped to the deal — from a bounded pre-LOI read to full pre-close diligence with data-room, code, and management access.
Portfolio & Hold-Period Health
Baseline, trajectory, and standing early warning for owned companies — a deep retrospective when a hold underperforms, and a quarterly watch so it doesn't.
Operating Leadership
Embedded technology leadership the sponsor places into a portfolio company — and venture-build advisory for platforms standing up new products.
Drift, not mis-fit, is what destroys value — and drift leaves a record.
Bain's 2024 Global M&A Report finds the median large transaction captures roughly 70 percent of the synergies modelled at signing; the gap is dominated by integration execution and operating-model mis-alignment, not target selection. McKinsey's Done deal? (2022), across 2,500 deals of €1 billion or more, traces terminations and write-downs to the same class of cause. Our framework reads the slope of the operating model, not just its snapshot — because the slope is what predicts the post-close gap, and the slope is visible in commit histories, incident records, hiring data, and retention cohorts long before it reaches the financials.
Technical Health Index — the framework's single-number output, with the evidence behind every point.
A score in this band means the investment thesis itself needs rewriting before further spend.
Strengths are documented; remaining risks are named and carry owners on the integration plan.
Built so the verdict can be trusted.
Fixed fees with no contingency — the answer costs the same whether the deal closes or dies. NDA-first, with a per-engagement boundary on credentials and data. Two readers score independently against the same evidence before anything ships, and the partner who signs the report is the one who did the work and takes the IC readout.
Bring the deal at whatever stage it's in.
Pre-LOI, we deliver a written read scoped to the deal. Post-LOI, full transaction diligence runs inside the exclusivity window. Already owned, we baseline the company and stand a recurring watch. The scoping call — not this page — is where the right instrument is chosen.