Quanly
Series A Technical Due Diligence & Scale
The Situation
Quanly had product-market fit. Their workflow automation tool for mid-market operations teams was growing 15% month-over-month. Customers loved it. The problem was under the hood.
The founding engineers had built fast and loose — exactly right for finding PMF. But now the codebase was a liability. No tests. No CI/CD. A single Heroku dyno serving 2,000 active companies. The CEO was preparing for a Series A and every investor asked the same question: "Can this scale?"
The honest answer was no. Not yet.
When my startup with product-market fit is preparing to raise institutional funding,
I want to demonstrate technical maturity and scalability without slowing feature velocity,
So I can secure investment while holding the growth trajectory that attracted investors.
The Approach
The founders expected me to rebuild everything. I did the opposite — I stabilized what existed and built scaffolding for growth.
Week one: I audited the entire codebase, infrastructure, and team capabilities. The assessment was honest but not alarming. The code wasn't bad — it was just undisciplined. The architecture wasn't wrong — it just hadn't been designed for what came next.
I established three priorities for the first 90 days:
Reliability first. Before we could scale, we needed to stop breaking. I introduced error tracking (Sentry), structured logging, and a simple CI pipeline that ran the 12 tests that existed. We wrote 200 more tests over the next month, covering every critical workflow.
Team structure second. Four engineers doing everything meant four engineers doing nothing well. I split them into two squads: Platform (reliability, performance, infrastructure) and Product (features, experiments, customer requests). Each squad owned their roadmap.
Investor narrative third. I wrote the technical diligence package: architecture documentation, scalability plan, security audit, and a 12-month technical roadmap. Not aspirational — every item was tied to a business outcome. "We'll add Redis caching" became "We'll reduce p99 latency from 2.8s to 400ms, enabling real-time collaboration that 67% of churned customers cited as their #1 feature request."
The System
Over 12 months, the platform evolved:
The key decision was what we didn't build. No microservices. No Kubernetes. No event sourcing. Every architectural choice was justified by a current bottleneck, not a hypothetical future one.
The Outcome
The Series A closed. The lead investor told the CEO that the technical diligence package was "the most compelling they'd seen from a seed-stage company." That wasn't because the technology was impressive — it was because the strategy was clear.
OUTCOMES
CAPABILITIES APPLIED
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