Item four is a good example. A license list is cheap to answer if someone kept track and very expensive to reconstruct in the middle of a raise.

For startups using AI heavily I would add two things to prepare well before diligence: a short record of which parts of the system were generated and how they were reviewed, and tests around the flows an investor will ask about first, such as billing, authentication and data access. Reviewers tend to worry less that AI wrote code than that nobody can explain or verify it.

Founders often try to fix all of this at once right before a round. It goes better as a few small, clearly scoped pieces of work done earlier, each with its own definition of done, like a dependency and license inventory or a tested payments module. Which item on the request list do founders find hardest to answer?