Operator-Led Technical Diligence
I represent private equity in software transactions where the technical condition of the business can affect price, structure, or the operating case.
Every diligence client to date has elected to retain me post-close, including those I advised required no remediation.
Next availability · April 2027
The deal teams that call me have commissioned enough CrossLake and West Monroe reports to know the difference between diligence performed as ceremony and diligence performed for an investment decision.
Blackmere is principal-only. The person who examines the systems presents the findings and, when retained, carries them into execution.
Technical risk translated into underwriting conclusions.
Production AI tied to an operating constraint or an investment thesis.
The operator who diagnosed the problem executes the work.
Run the buyer’s technical playbook before the buyer does.
Representative work across diligence, post-close execution, and portfolio-level advisory. Some of it changed the facts used to understand a business. Some changed the economics or the systems themselves.
No analyst layer. No subcontractors. No delivery pyramid between the person who found the fact and the person explaining why it matters.
The remediation plan is written by somebody who may have to execute every sentence in it. That tends to improve the quality of the prose.
A limited number of concurrent mandates. A firm expected to enter a portfolio company after close needs room on the calendar.
There are limits to what diligence can establish before close. Blackmere quantifies what it can and states what remains unknown. A complete remediation program cannot be scoped from a data room when production access or operating authority is required to know what the work entails.
Blackmere is the practice of Mo Battah.
Before founding it, he was the principal executive responsible for Alpine Investors’ largest software roll-up, Actabl, integrating four companies into a unified platform. Before private equity, he scaled engineering through VC-backed hypergrowth from Series A through a $1B+ valuation. He has run full-stack engineering, cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP, SRE, DevOps, and cybersecurity across multi-product portfolios.
The practice itself was created by private equity demand. A fund approached him during his transition out of Alpine. That first mandate became buy-side diligence and then post-close execution. Another transaction required sell-side representation. The service lines followed the work.
He also invests directly. A SAFE in Kodiak Robotics returned 4.8x MOIC in under a year. As an LP in Aviso Ventures, his portfolio includes exits to Palo Alto Networks, Dropbox, and SpaceX.
That puts him in deal rooms in two capacities: as the person examining the technology and as an investor committing his own capital. The distinction is useful because technical diligence eventually reduces to a capital-allocation question: which technical facts deserve money, time, or attention, and which do not.
For 2027 mandates, send a brief overview of the asset and expected transaction timing to mo@blackmere.ai.