Venture capital and fundraising

Penningtons Manches Cooper has a highly experienced venture capital team that advises on all aspects of venture capital investment and equity fundraising. We act for investors, business angels and investee companies and are regularly recommended by institutional investors to advise their portfolio companies.

Our market-leading VC team, which is recognised by The Legal 500, advises on numerous fundraising transactions from start-up and pre-seed funding through seed and angel funding to very large institutional syndicate investments. We cover all aspects of any funding deal including due diligence, term sheets, structuring, tax (including EIS, SEIS and VCT), warranties and disclosure, IP issues, EMI and other share option schemes.

A key feature of our offering is the strength of our intellectual property and life sciences teams, and we work closely with them to ensure that our clients’ technologies are properly understood and handled in any VC transaction. We also cover all related areas of law relevant to growth technology companies including research agreements, collaboration agreements, joint ventures, licensing deals, employment law and real estate law.

Our team is also a market leader in advice to investee companies, particularly in London and the South East, including Oxford and Cambridge, and we are happy to work with start-ups in order to join them on their growth journey. Our extensive experience means we are able to offer efficient and flexible fee arrangements to suit the specific needs of the VC market.

We also have a particular specialism in acting for university spin-out companies, in particular from Imperial College of Science and Technology, the University of Oxford and the University of Surrey.