Driving Sdui Group’s Expansion with Technical Due Diligence

About the company 

Founded in 2018 in Koblenz, Germany, Sdui Group has rapidly grown into one of Europe’s leading educational technology providers. Its mission is to build a comprehensive operating system for schools and early childhood education centres, streamlining communication and organisation through GDPR-compliant digital solutions.

Key Figures:

Strategic Acquisitions:

• Additio App (Spain): A platform focused on learning management
  and formative assessment
• FoxEducation (Austria): Providers of communication and administration tools for schools and kindergartens
• Pupil AG (Switzerland): A leading administrative solution for schools

As part of its international expansion strategy, Sdui Group entered negotiations to acquire a Spanish EdTech business via a carveout deal. This acquisition represented a strategic opportunity to strengthen its footprint in Southern Europe and Latin America, and integrate new capabilities that complemented its vision of a unified digital education platform.

However, the cross-border nature of the transaction introduced several layers of complexity including technical ambiguity, regulatory considerations (notably GDPR), language barriers, and cultural differences that could impact both valuation and integration outcomes. Limited visibility into the target’s technical landscape also posed a risk of misaligned expectations and unforeseen post-acquisition investments.

Sdui’s objectives included:

• Validate the investment thesis and support valuation
• Identify and mitigate post-acquisition risks
• Highlight integration and value-creation opportunities
• Ensure compliance with GDPR and other legal standards.
• Retain critical talent and maintain operational continuity.

To address these challenges, Sdui Group partnered with Codurance, selecting them for their strong technical due diligence capabilities and regional understanding, ensuring a focused and context-aware six-week engagement.

To support Sdui Group in making a high-stakes acquisition decision, Codurance mobilised a senior, cross-functional team combining expertise in software engineering, product strategy, and technical due diligence. The objective was to deliver a 360-degree evaluation of the target company’s product, technology, and team, ensuring every key factor was assessed through the lens of integration readiness, scalability, and strategic alignment.

This was not a routine assessment; it was a precision-driven engagement designed to uncover both critical risks and untapped potential, shaping the future of Sdui Group’s platform consolidation in Europe and Latin America.

Codurance’s deep expertise in modernisation was pivotal here: we drilled into the foundational layers of the codebase, architectural decisions, and deployment practices to surface the detailed technical realities essential for an informed carveout. This level of granularity allowed Sdui Group to accurately forecast the engineering effort required to integrate and evolve the platform post-acquisition.

Moreover, Codurance brought a unique edge as a local partner with global capability, blending our strong presence and cultural fluency in Spain with international delivery standards. This allowed us to seamlessly bridge language and cultural nuances during interviews, documentation reviews, and stakeholder alignment, helping Sdui Group navigate the local landscape with confidence while maintaining global rigor.

Scope of Assessment

Over six weeks, Codurance conducted a comprehensive analysis across eight strategic dimensions:

• Product Fit & Maturity
  Alignment of the product’s architecture, roadmap, and UX with Sdui Group’s long-term platform vision
• Data & Analytics
  Structure and governance of data architecture, AI enablement, and reporting capabilities
• Infrastructure & Operations
  Evaluation of hosting environments, cloud adoption, monitoring practices, and operational resilience
• Architecture & Scalability
  Review of system modularity, technical performance, and ability to scale with Sdui Group’s growth trajectory
• Technical Debt & Maintainability
  Assessment of codebase health, legacy issues, and long-term sustainability of the technology stack
• Team & Processes
  Analysis of team structure, skillsets, engineering culture, and agile maturity
• Intellectual Property & Technology Ownership
  Verification of software ownership, licensing models, and third-party dependencies
• Cyber Security & GDPR Compliance
  Examination of security practices, data protection measures, and regulatory risk exposure

Through detailed document reviews, codebase analysis, stakeholder interviews, and independent benchmarking, Codurance provided Sdui Group with both strategic clarity and technical depth to inform their decision with confidence.

Codurance applied a structured, insight-driven methodology designed to surface not only the current state of the target’s technology, but also its scalability, risks, and alignment with Sdui Group’s long-term objectives.

As part of our technical deep dive, we conducted a comprehensive audit that encompassed the system architecture, source code repositories, and available internal documentation. This holistic review enabled us to assess the coherence of the software design, evaluate the modularity and structure of the codebase, and determine the overall quality of implementation-crucial factors for ensuring maintainability and long-term scalability.

To complement our technical analysis, we held structured interviews with key stakeholders, including technical leads, product owners, and engineers, which provided valuable insights into the team’s daily engineering practices, development workflows, and the strategic intentions behind product decisions. These interviews helped contextualise our findings and ensured a deeper understanding of how technical execution aligned with broader business goals.

Crucially, this also allowed us to capture and preserve pre-acquisition knowledge including tacit know-how, architectural rationales, and undocumented practices that might otherwise have been lost. By proactively mapping these insights and identifying key personnel, we created continuity pathways that ensured critical technical context carried forward into the integration phase.

In parallel, we conducted an independent benchmarking exercise, comparing the target’s technology stack and feature set against leading solutions in the EdTech sector. This analysis allowed us to identify potential innovation opportunities and areas where the platform could strengthen its differentiation in a competitive market landscape.

And finally, to ensure our work remained closely aligned with Sdui Group’s evolving priorities, we established an agile, feedback-driven collaboration model. Weekly checkpoints with the leadership team enabled us to validate key findings early, adapt the scope of the assessment in real time, and maintain a clear, shared direction throughout the engagement.

This iterative, collaborative approach enabled Codurance to deliver findings that were both technically robust and strategically actionable.

At the conclusion of the six-week engagement, Codurance delivered a dual-layered report: a concise executive summary to inform strategic decision-makers, and an in-depth technical assessment to guide post-acquisition planning and integration execution.

This comprehensive due diligence enabled Sdui Group to make its acquisition decision with clarity, confidence, and negotiating strength.

Key outcomes included:

• Informed Negotiation Leverage
  Armed with detailed insight into the target’s technical maturity and future investment requirements, Sdui was able to recalibrate deal terms to more accurately reflect real value.
• Early Risk Mitigation
  We uncovered three critical integration risks early in the process, enabling Sdui to proactively address them, ultimately accelerating their post-merger roadmap by approximately two months.
• Regulatory Risk Reduction
  Gaps in GDPR compliance were identified and flagged, allowing the team to prevent potential exposure and plan remediation before acquisition closure.
• Value Creation Roadmap
  The analysis highlighted areas of high strategic potential including data modernisation and DevOps automation, that aligned directly with Sdui’s scalability goals.
• Talent Retention Strategy
  Key technical personnel were identified for retention, reducing the risk of knowledge loss and ensuring smoother transition and continuity.

In addition, by surfacing informal knowledge flows and undocumented design decisions early in the due diligence, Codurance helped Sdui maintain access to core system understanding post-acquisition – mitigating the risk of losing critical pre-deal knowledge during the transition.

Thanks to this structured, insight-led approach, Sdui Group moved forward with a clear understanding of both the risks and opportunities inherent in the deal and a well-defined technical roadmap to support
long-term integration and value creation.

Conclusion

In a transaction where uncertainty could have easily eroded deal value, Codurance delivered clarity, structure, and foresight. By combining deep technical expertise with strategic context, we enabled Sdui Group to not only validate a key international acquisition, but to turn complexity into competitive advantage.

Our ability to dissect complex technical ecosystems with precision – down to the architectural and codebase level, was instrumental in aligning expectations around the carveout. Combined with our culturally aware, bilingual approach and international delivery reach, Codurance provided Sdui Group with a partner capable of operating at every level: technical, strategic, and interpersonal.

Our rigorous due diligence surfaced hidden risks, identified critical opportunities, and laid the groundwork for a seamless post-merger integration. As Sdui Group continues to build one of Europe’s most ambitious digital education ecosystems, this engagement stands as a clear example of how technical insight, applied at the right moment, can unlock long-term value and accelerate growth.