MVA
    Back to insights

    Market

    Tech Due Diligence in the age of agents: what Brazilian investors should check in 2026

    Brazilian PE and VC funds still treat Tech DD as a compliance checklist. When the target runs on AI agents, that checklist misses 70% of the relevant risks.

    Equipe MVA 7 min readPublished on April 12, 2026· Last updated: April 17, 2026

    The first generation of Tech DD in Brazil copied the Big Four playbook: check whether source code is versioned, tests are automated, infra is on cloud, there's a DR plan. That's still necessary. But in AI-first targets, it's far from sufficient.

    What changes when the operation depends on an agent

    A vertical AI agent has operational risk different from a traditional stack. Output depends on third-party models (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) — changes in those models change the product's behavior. If a firm depends on LawPilot to triage 50k cases per month and MVA swaps the base LLM, the firm feels it.

    Assessing that risk requires looking at evals: what does the company measure to guarantee agent quality? How often does it run? Is there automated rollback?

    Five specific checks for AI-native targets

    1. LLM dependency model: who is the primary vendor? Is there a fallback? What's the cost of switching? 2. Evaluations: is there an automated eval suite running on PRs? Coverage? Historical drift tracking?

    3. Cost control: what does a single execution cost? What's the margin above inference cost? Compressing trend? 4. Context engineering: how is the agent kept with regulatory context? Humans curating prompts? A proprietary agent? 5. Observability: can you audit a specific execution? Are reasoning logs stored?

    How MVA structures that scoring

    Our framework has 26 dimensions grouped into 4 categories (architecture, team, operations, security). For AI-first targets, we extend the 'operations' module with 5 additional dimensions: model risk, eval discipline, inference economics, context pipeline, behavioral observability.

    Concrete result: in 2025, in three PE deals reviewed by MVA, those five dimensions flagged material risks that a traditional checklist would have missed. In two of those deals, term sheet conditions changed.

    Other posts

    View all