Team size: Three

Major legal advisors: CCA, Cuatrecasas, Abreu, Garrigues, SRS

Jurisdictions your role covers: Portugal, Spain, Italy, UK & Ireland, Norway, Germany Malta, Brazil and United States of America.

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Over the past year, the team have worked closely with the business team of Indico Capital, during a particularly active period for the firm, marked by new fundraising activity, portfolio growth and increasingly international transactions.

A key milestone was the launch of Indico’s sixth fund – Indico VC Fund III, our third flagship fund – targeting €125m, with a €30m anchor commitment from the European Investment Fund. The fund focuses on Seed-to-Series B technology companies across Portugal, Spain, Italy and their respective diasporas, with particular exposure to high-growth sectors such as enterprise SaaS, AI, deeptech, spacetech and oceantech. The process involved complex fundraising, structuring and governance work, as well as the coordination of investor, regulatory and operational requirements among multiple stakeholders. 

Alongside fund incorporation activity, I have been closely involved in a number of significant portfolio transactions and strategic growth events across our 5 funds. These included Cargofive’s acquisition by cargo.one, a strategic M&A transaction in logistics and freight technology; Rows’ acquisition by Superhuman, involving the integration of a Portuguese-founded technology team into an international productivity platform; and multiple important financing rounds and strategic investments involving companies such as Preply, Dealroom, PandaDoc, Oscar, Indie Campers, Spotlite, WSense, Nutrium, Lyzer, Primetag, Worfully  and Sword Health, among others. Many of these matters involved coordinating investors, founders and advisers across multiple jurisdictions and legal systems and required balancing execution speed with legal discipline in fast-moving and often founder-led environments.

More broadly, one of my priorities last year has been helping position the legal function as a business-enabling and institution-building function within Indico Capital: maintaining high standards while ensuring that legal analysis remains practical, commercially grounded and closely aligned with the pace at which venture-backed companies operate. Throughout these matters, we have worked closely with external counsel and internal stakeholders to coordinate execution across complex, multijurisdictional workstreams.

What do you value most in external advisers working alongside your team: sector knowledge, responsiveness, innovation, or something else?

What I value most is judgement. Technical excellence and sector knowledge are non-negotiable, but the best external advisers are those who quickly understand the commercial context, identify the issues that truly matter and translate legal complexity into practical, prioritised options that support informed decisions.   

In venture capital and technology transactions, advisers need to operate comfortably in fast-moving environments involving founder dynamics, investor expectations, fund structures, governance negotiations and cross-border execution.

Responsiveness matters, but clarity of judgement matters even more. I particularly value advisers who understand that in-house legal teams operate very close to business decision-making and that external counsel should help reduce noise rather than add to it: identifying material risks, calibrating proportionality and helping teams move forward efficiently while maintaining appropriate institutional standards.

How has the role of the legal function evolved within your organisation over recent years, and where do you see it adding the most strategic value today? 

Over recent years, I have worked to position the legal function as a strategic partner to the investment, finance, compliance and portfolio teams, rather than simply a point of legal review.

At Indico Capital, legal work is deeply connected to investment activity and fund management, which means legal judgement has a direct impact on deal certainty, investor confidence, governance quality and long-term portfolio value. Legal considerations are frequently embedded early in transaction discussions and investment execution, particularly in regulated or emerging sectors where legal, operational and reputational risks are closely interconnected.

Today, I see the legal function adding the greatest strategic value by translating complexity into clear and actionable decisions. One important aspect of the role is helping the organisation scale while maintaining consistency and discipline.