Venture capital and equity investments

Helping investors fund exciting, entrepreneurial and growing businesses and assisting businesses raise capital for their start up and scale up – we’ve been doing this successfully for years.

The right funding can be vital to a business’ successful start up or scale up. Our expertise and strong track record of advising a wide range of investors means we can advise on the investment process and terms as well as industry trends and norms.

We also work with many exciting entrepreneurial businesses on their fundraisings. We're well networked in the investment community, can make useful introductions and have insight into what co-investors or, if you are a business raising money, your investors are looking for, which is incredibly useful to ensure a smooth, successful closing of your fundraising.

Our experience

We have years of experience working with investors on their portfolio investments and are used to ensuring a smooth transaction process, often within tight time frames and budgets.

We also have a wide range of expertise in fund creation and fund structuring, as well as portfolio management and exits. This means we understand the whole VC fund life cycle, which gives an insight into a VC fund’s investment approach or objectives during the investment negotiations. This is coupled with our deep sector expertise in technology, life sciences and healthcare.

Examples of our recent experience include:

  • Helping a top five UK most active investment fund on more than 45 investments with an aggregate investment amount of almost £40m over the last year.

  • Advising a UK investment fund on its investment as part of an investor syndicate in a £24million fundraising by a Cambridge-based life sciences business. We have helped this investor set up three VC funds, the latest closing at £100million.

  • Acting for a UK media assets manager and content distributor on its syndicated funding round involving VCT, EIS and offshore VC funds on a £7million investment round.

Did you know?

100 investment deals

We advise on more than 100 investment deals in any year, with aggregate investment amounts of between £100million and £250million.

Rankings

We are ranked in the legal directories, Chambers and Legal 500, for investments work.

DeepMind and Grapeshot

We advised DeepMind and Grapeshot on their fundraisings. DeepMind sold to Google for $500million and Grapeshot to Oracle for $325million.

What our clients say about us?

“Experienced across an array of venture capital matters, including representing funds, start-ups and entrepreneurs in key fundraisings, growth transactions and exits, with niche skills in university spin-out matters.”

Chambers 2018

“The incisive and responsive legal support provided by Mills & Reeve to our investments team has been vital in enabling us to achieve our investment ambitions – they have an ability to move mountains at short notice.”

Chief Investment Officer, Mercia Technologies PLC

“They are great in venture capital fund-raising. They are pragmatic, keep things simple and are very cost-effective.”

Chambers 2017

Our clients

We work with some of the leading and most active VC and angel investors in the UK, including:

  • Mercia Technologies PLC
  • IQ Capital Partners
  • Albion Capital Group
  • Park Walk Advisers
  • 24 Haymarket

We advise exciting entrepreneurial businesses, such as:

  • Sphere Fluidics
  • Imagen
  • Grapeshot
  • PragmatIC Printing

Our lawyers

Our lawyers advise on 100+ investments each year working with institutional funds, business angels, family office funds and corporate venture funds as well as entrepreneurial businesses fundraising from such investors.

Get in touch

Our team of legal experts are here to support you.
Contact one of our lawyers today.

Meet the name venture capital and equity investments team