In our work with African FinTech deals, we have uncovered multiple instances of improper open source code usage, which could have led to significant litigation risk for the developer teams. In one case, a developer had incorrectly marked their code as MIT licensed internally, while another potential client had used GNU GPL code in a production service, creating a requirement for it to be open sourced.

A client was evaluating a startup that claimed to have innovated in web search by scraping results in real-time when a query is made. While the technology was functional and could have worked, our analysis revealed that the compute costs were unsustainable due to mistakes in estimating COGS.