A portfolio company closed six months ago with a clear AI-led thesis: deploy large language models across the customer-facing support function, reduce headcount cost by 30%, and lift gross margin by 400 basis points. Three months in, inference bills hit $47,000 monthly while average revenue per user sat at $19. The operating partner called for…

West Monroe was brought in to design the EBITDA bridge for a PE-backed B2B software platform six months before exit. The firm delivered a 90-page transformation roadmap, identified $4.2M in addressable margin, and departed. Eighteen months later the operating team had implemented one of fourteen recommended workstreams, the roadmap sat in a Confluence archive, and…

A portfolio company closes with $42M in revenue, 18% EBITDA, and a four-year-old Salesforce instance no one has touched since the founder’s nephew set it up. The sponsor’s 100-day value creation plan promises “implement pricing analytics” and “accelerate digital acquisition.” Three months later, the operator reports that the HubSpot migration is 60% complete and the…

A European PE firm closed a €180M carve-out with a 12-month TSA and 18 months later it was still paying €240,000 annually in stranded IT costs from the parent company. The carve-out consulting firm had delivered the separation blueprint, diagnosed the dependencies, and left. No one inside the portfolio company had the technical capacity to…

“`html Portfolio digital partners embed engineering capacity in operating plans A mid-market PE firm closed a $180 million acquisition of a SaaS company with strong recurring revenue and immediately discovered that the platform ran on infrastructure nobody at the company could explain. The CTO had left during diligence. The remaining engineering team could keep the…

By Mario Peshev, DevriX You already know the engineering stack will not be perfect. Every asset you look at has technical debt, an over-tenured lead who owns too much undocumented knowledge, and a roadmap that is 40 percent aspiration. The question that decides whether you sign, and at what price, is not “is the technology…

By Mario Peshev, DevriX You are three weeks from signing an LOI and the target’s engineering story does not sit right. Revenue is real, the founder is credible, the product demos well. But the ARR is riding on a codebase nobody outside the founding team has read, and your investment committee expects a technology view…

By Mario Peshev, DevriX You are three weeks from close on a lower-middle-market SaaS platform, and the cyber section of the data room is thin: a two-year-old penetration test with all findings marked “remediated,” a SOC 2 report that expired last quarter, and a founder-CTO who answers every security question with “we’ve never had a…