Gunderson Dettmer LLP > San Diego, United States > Firm Profile

Gunderson Dettmer LLP > Firm Profile

Gunderson Dettmer is the only international corporate law firm singularly focused on the global venture capital and emerging companies marketplace. With more than 350 lawyers in ten offices—Silicon Valley, Ann Arbor, Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Beijing, and Singapore—the firm represents more than 2,500 high-growth technology and life sciences companies from a broad range of industries and at every stage of development. The firm provides clients with counsel on general corporate and securities law, mergers and acquisitions, financings, intellectual property and commercial agreements, strategic alliances, executive compensation, employment, privacy, public company and tax matters.

This market approach gives the firm the insight and networks to provide practical advice and guidance that is of critical importance to emerging companies looking to grow, scale and expand. The firm supports companies at every stage of their life cycle by leveraging industry relationships, embedded market knowledge, and strategic business insights tailored to clients’ needs.

The firm is also a recognized international leader in representing venture capital and private equity investment funds. With extensive experience in North America, Asia, Latin America and Europe, the firm’s lawyers provide general counsel, fund formation and investor representation services to hundreds of the world’s leading venture capital and private equity firms.

Gunderson Dettmer is consistently recognized as the leader in venture capital and growth equity fund formations and equity financings, routinely earning the highest industry rankings from PitchBook, Chambers & Partners, The Legal 500, Best Lawyers, and others.

Emerging and maturing companies: Gunderson’s corporate lawyers focus exclusively on the emerging technology market, making them uniquely qualified to help management, Boards and investors achieve their goals — whether raising capital, achieving a successful M&A or IPO transaction or thriving as a public company. The firm’s lawyers represent technology and life science companies of all sizes in the US, India, China, Europe, Latin America, Middle East and other markets globally.

Licensing, strategic partnering and commercial transactions: The firm’s technology team routinely works on 100+ significant strategic transactions in the technology and life sciences sectors every year, including dozens of strategic partnering deals. The team has done every type of deal that emerging, maturing and public companies undertake as they develop, acquire and monetize technologies and create new business models to bring products to market.

Venture capital and growth equity: Gunderson is the world’s leading law firm for venture capital and growth equity funds. The firm’s fund lawyers provide practical guidance on a full range of operational, formation, investment and liquidity issues for more than 450 fund firms and negotiate close to 1/3 of every venture capital dollar raised worldwide — more than any other firm in the world. The firm’s market leadership ensures the most timely guidance on emerging trends and unrivaled business and strategic advice.

Executive compensation: Gunderson lawyers are steeped in the tax, corporate and securities, labor and employment and related technical complexities that govern compensation arrangements. The firm’s team designs compensation plans that are essential to emerging growth and maturing companies’ ability to attract and retain top talent.

Labor and employment: Gunderson’s employment lawyers know the issues that technology and life sciences companies confront daily and leverage their keen understanding of industry contexts to provide unique insight and solutions.

Tax: From formation to financing to exit, the firm’s tax lawyers advise founders, executives and investors on tax matters at each stage of the business growth cycle. Gunderson’s tax team provides guidance on structuring transactions and ongoing counsel for tax planning and compliance issues. The firm recognizes that tax advantages and business purposes often conflict, and the tax team is adept at figuring out how to achieve the right balance to serve its clients.

International work: With over 2,600 transactions completed outside of the US since 2014, Gunderson Dettmer lawyers are intimately familiar with the tax, structuring, regulatory and comparative law aspects of cross-border and international investing and representation.

China: Gunderson maintains the pre-eminent China-focused venture capital fund practice, combining extensive Silicon Valley experience with a deep knowledge of the local China market. The firm has extensive expertise in both fund and company representation and structuring cross-border financings at all stages. Since launching the Beijing office at the end of 2012, the firm rapidly achieved prominence in China and across Asia among top venture-backed companies and venture and growth equity funds for its work with respect to equity financings, joint ventures, cross-border M&A and other strategic transactions. The practice also earned acclaim from various publications, including ALM’s Asian Law Awards, China Business Law Journal and PitchBook.

India and Southeast Asia: With the 2016 opening of Gunderson’s Singapore office, the firm solidified its presence in the region. Gunderson represents some of the highest funded Indian and Southeast Asian technology companies as well as a number of leading investors active in the region. The firm also handled the most highly-valued private sell-side M&A deal in history — Flipkart’s $16bn acquisition by Walmart in 2018.

Latin America: Gunderson represents a dominant share of the leading tech companies in Latin America, including many of the highest valued companies, and has negotiated most of the largest venture capital and technology M&A transactions in the region. The firm also acts as fund formation counsel for nearly every significant venture capital fund in the region. Its attorneys also have relationships with key government bodies supporting market development such as: INADEM in Mexico, CORFO in Chile, Innpulsa in Colombia, Ministerio de Produccion of the Argentine Republic, as well as a wide array of local law firms, angel investors, accelerators, advisors and other market participants.