When you raise, an acquirer or investor's counsel runs IP diligence — and "we vibe-coded it with Cursor and two contractors" is where deals get repriced or held up. The gaps are almost always fixable, but only before someone is looking. Work through the eight things diligence checks, flagged by severity, and see where you'd fail today.
Every gap here is something a diligence lawyer will flag — and a chain-of-title hole in your core IP can delay a close or shave a valuation. Most of these are paperwork you can fix in a week if you start before the data room opens.
Two things are new for AI-built companies. First, AI coding tools: whether you own what Copilot or Cursor produced depends on those tools' terms — most assign output to the user, but you need to have actually accepted terms that say so, and to understand the open-source-suggestion risk. Second, model output and training-data rights: if your product's value is in outputs from a third-party model, your rights to use and commercialize those outputs are governed by that provider's terms, not by default ownership. Diligence teams have started asking about both, and a clean answer is fast becoming table stakes.