Private equity & venture capital

With a long-standing reputation for excellence in company law, we work with both private equity and venture capital backed businesses to promote and develop their companies and investment professionals in building their UK, European and US portfolios.

Our strengths in understanding venture capital and private equity fundraising and investment from all perspectives is borne out of the variety of our experience in acting for:

  • funds being established and raising investment monies (see our investment funds page)
  • founders of seed funded and early stage companies
  • business angel, venture capital, venture debt and private equity investors
  • university spin-outs
  • management teams and companies seeking funding
  • investee companies on portfolio transactions
  • investors and founders/managers on exit transactions, whether trade sales or IPOs.

Working closely with the firm’s dedicated tax specialists we provide a commercial and tax-efficient approach to structuring funds, investments and founder incentives. Our ability to provide integrated specialist teams of regulatory, employment, real estate, commercial, technology and banking lawyers allows us to offer a strongly focused, and full service and means we provide consistent support to drive the process through to completion as smoothly as possible.

Our approach is to provide a highly professional but not over-lawyered service, complemented by competitively sound commercial and legal advice and a keen eye on costs.

We pride ourselves on developing strategies that assist our clients in creating and sustaining real value in their business. To this end, we put clients in touch with our strong network of contacts, be it sources of funding, potential investment or acquisition targets, or simply as customers and suppliers. We also assist our clients in unlocking government-sponsored sources of finance.

With many years’ experience of advising clients in the Information Technology sector, we have the capability to provide first class advice to all those involved with creating and/or exploiting technology. Our lawyers have a keen interest in IT and we even have tecchies-turned-lawyers on the team! This means we can speak the client’s language and understand the technical aspects of a deal, as well as the legal ones, to ensure that the advice we give is commercially and technically second to none.

Our involvement in the sector is enhanced through our support and sponsorship of the London Business Angels network and we have recently been shortlisted for the second year running for 2010 “European Venture Capital Service Provider of the Year” award by Investor Allstars.

Experience

Private Equity

  • £4.5m investment by Intuition Capital Limited and HNW’s in Betting Shop Holdings Limited
  • Quotient Bioscience Limited: acting for CEO and major shareholder in £25m investment by TA Associates
  • Advising Polytechnos Venture-Partners II on a 6.5m Euro “downround” investment in Nanotron Technologies (a leading provider of energy-efficient location-aware wireless solutions).

Venture Debt

  • Acting for a leading European venture debt fund in over 80 venture debt investments in Europe and the United States in a broad range of sectors including software, life sciences, semiconductors, communication and financial.

Venture Capital

  • Acting on behalf of a start-up company with a highly sophisticated product enabling the client Group to provide retail customers with protection against the risks of negative equity as well as providing corporate clients with a complex derivative based product for land sale and leaseback arrangements which is backed by a high profile multi-national bank
  • Advising VCT funds managed by Beringea on their initial and follow-on investments in Dianomi, (an online provider of innovative performance-based marketing) and on their investment into Opticvision (integrated security solutions)
  • Advising Albion Ventures (formerly Close Ventures) on its follow-on investment (through its VCT funds) in Dexela (a developer of 3-D imaging technology for the early detection of breast cancer) in which London Technology Fund participated as a co-investor
  • Advising Business Angels on an investment, and simultaneous buyout of a 3i shareholding, in Matrix MicroScience, a leading immuno-magnetic diagnostics company
  • Advising Triopsis (a provider of photographic business analysis systems to the retail sector) on an investment by a syndicate of Business Angels
  • Advising Optima Data Intelligence Services (a technology company backed by Beringea’s ProVen VCT funds) on its acquisition of Sussex Computers and A.I. Bureau .

Buy-outs and buy-ins

  • Intuition Capital buy-out of Litelogic Limited (in administration) and refinancing
  • Management : acting for Tom Aikens in buy-out of T&L Limited (in administration) by Oakley Capital
  • Sale of Pacific World Limited as part of US $70m sale of Pacific World Cosmetics Group to Levine Leichtman Capital Partners Inc.

Restructuring and Insolvency

  • Advising Tom Aikens on the administration and pre-pack of Tom’s Kitchen and Tom Aikens Restaurant.
  • Advising PML Flightlink on a contested administration appointment.