🔒 Confidential · prepared for Northwind board For the board and its advisers only

Sable & Fen Technology Advisory

Technical Due Diligence

Northwind logistics platform · pre-Series-B assessment

Prepared forNorthwind Holdings

EngagementNW·DD·0426

Issued14 May 2026

Lead reviewerA. Sable

01 · Executive summary

Sound architecture, three material risks to close before scale.

Overall assessment

Proceed. The platform is well-built for its current stage; three findings must be remediated inside 90 days to support Series-B load.

Northwind’s engineering is above the median for its stage. The service boundaries are clean, deployment is automated, and test coverage on the billing path is genuinely strong. The concerns are not with what has been built but with what has not yet been hardened for the next order of magnitude of traffic and scrutiny.

Three findings are material to the transaction. None is a reason to walk; each is a reason to hold a portion of the round against a dated remediation plan, set out in section four.

02 · Risk profile

Where the exposure sits

Assessed across six areas against our standard scale-readiness rubric. The matrix places the four findings by likelihood and impact; the strip beneath records residual risk by area after existing controls.

Address pre-close 90-day plan Monitor

Residual risk by area · after existing controls

Secrets & accessHigh

Data resilienceMed

ObservabilityMed

DependenciesLow

Code qualityLow

DeliveryLow

03 · Material findings

Three to remediate, one to watch

The exposure concentrates on the revenue path. Where each finding sits:

Secrets present in CI build logs

Critical

Deployment credentials and a third-party API key are printed to the CI log stream and retained for 90 days, readable by every contractor with pipeline access. Ref DD-04 · owner: Platform

Single-region primary data store, no tested failover

Material

The primary store runs in one region with nightly backups but no read-replica and no rehearsed restore. Recovery-time objective is undefined; a regional outage is an unbounded outage. Ref DD-07 · owner: Infrastructure

No structured tracing on billing and fulfilment paths

Material

Failures on the two revenue-bearing paths are reconstructed from raw logs by hand. At Series-B load, mean time to diagnose becomes the bottleneck, not mean time to fix. Ref DD-02 · owner: Platform

Dependency drift within tolerance

Monitor

Two frameworks are a major version behind but under active support; no known-exploited advisories apply. Track and schedule; not a pre-close item. Ref DD-11 · owner: Engineering

04 · Remediation roadmap

What to do, and by when

Sequenced so the critical item clears before signature and the remaining three land inside the 90-day window the board is holding funds against.

Ref	Action	Owner	Window
DD-04	Purge secrets from logs, rotate keys, move to a vault with scoped access	Platform	Pre-close
DD-07	Stand up a cross-region replica and rehearse a restore; publish an RTO	Infrastructure	30 days
DD-02	Add structured tracing to the billing and fulfilment paths	Platform	60 days
DD-11	Schedule framework upgrades into the standard maintenance train	Engineering	90 days