Growth companies

With a long-standing reputation for excellence in company law, we work with growth 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 growth and venture companies 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
• 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 techies-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.

Experience

Venture Debt

• Acting for a leading European venture debt fund in over 100 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

• Advised POD Food Limited on its venture capital fund raising and its management incentive scheme
• Advised Mission Capital plc on its £30m Reverse Takeover by Quindell Limited, a reselling and sales outsourcing company, and the company's readmission to AIM
• Advised a high net worth individual on their investment in Outbrand Retail Limited, trading as The Vital Ingredient.
• Advised Northill Capital, the asset management investment business backed by the Bertorelli Family, on its equity capital investment into Alpha Strategic PLC
• 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 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.

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.