Common practice from VC is to do a 3rd party financial audit - billed to the startup in the end. Very expensive, but as you mention, it helps uncover potential ticking time bombs.
It's easy to complain about a heavy, expensive finance audit, but startups commonly are setup or practicing mildly to extremely incorrectly. It's just too risky not to do it.
Tech audits seem to fly under the radar a lot. Post deal, I've had one principal complain to me a portfolio company was using a single table for users & bookings just more columns - what. Ruined the company for 14 months to fix the tech with all the deployed money and the business never recovered. Extreme, but there should be someone looking.
They were a ticket/booking platform for concerts in ASEAN.
I don't know much else beyond they had a single table which contained both users and bookings where new bookings were just in new columns next to the user info. If the user w/ the most bookings had 51 then they had at least 51 columns. Every time the max bookings user added a new booking they would add more columns - what.
If the DB data structure of the core business looks like that, you can imagine the rest built on top looks absolutely terrible.
Diligence would've easily seen this, but it was never performed. The VC never made that mistake again. Trust but verify.
It's easy to complain about a heavy, expensive finance audit, but startups commonly are setup or practicing mildly to extremely incorrectly. It's just too risky not to do it.
Tech audits seem to fly under the radar a lot. Post deal, I've had one principal complain to me a portfolio company was using a single table for users & bookings just more columns - what. Ruined the company for 14 months to fix the tech with all the deployed money and the business never recovered. Extreme, but there should be someone looking.