SECTOR

Start-ups

Overview

We combine our wealth of start-up experience, prominent presence in accelerator and investor communities and sector insight to provide pragmatic, cost-effective legal support to help launch, grow and successfully exit business ventures.

We advise along the entire life cycle of your business, from formation through to pre-seed funding through to Series A funding and beyond (including SEIS and EIS funding), venture capital investment, equity fundraising and debt arrangements. As you grow and scale, we can advise on people management issues and to support your talent acquisition and retention, we can advise on the design, drafting and implementation of share plans and incentive schemes.

We’re also well-versed in dealing with downlines and plans for dilutions.

Our team is experienced in advising at an early stage as you grow and develop your commercial model – ensuring you don’t get caught out. Your areas of risk could include safeguarding your intellectual property and data. We can support you to be compliant from the get-go, ensuring you develop your commercial model with privacy by design and built-in IT and contractual arrangements that will benefit you for the long term.

Our team can call upon specialist expertise across multiple legal disciplines to provide seamless and comprehensive legal support for companies at all stages of their growth cycle, including intellectual property protection and commercial exploitation, data protection and risk management.

We help members of leading university incubators and programmes understand every aspect of the legal process of taking an idea from concept to commercial product. 

We deliver comprehensive training sessions, provide drop-in support and assist in commercialising products, as well as creating documentation such as terms and conditions, privacy policies, and more. 

Key Contact

Work highlights

  • Advising Licentia Group Ltd, the owner of Mypinpad, an innovator in mobile card payments acceptance and identity authentication software services, on a substantial investment round of $13 million (c. £10.2 million) led by Crossfin Holdings.
  • Advising experiential travel platform, Tourhub Ltd, in connection with its £1 million aggregate co-investment from Waterspring Ventures, a venture capital investor in early-stage companies, and Development Bank of Wales.
  • Advising OBConnect Limited, a highly innovative fast growth company at the forefront of fin-tech innovation in connection with its £3 million investment by PayPoint Plc.
  • Advising HealthKey, a London-based healthtech, in its £1.13 million seed funding round.
  • Advising Carno, a fast-growing green-tech company, on the structure for its contracting agreements and data protection compliance. We also assisted Carno in negotiating contracts with major customers.
  • Advising a leading UK university on commercialising various mobile apps and drafting the associated terms and conditions of use and privacy policies, involving working with national brands such as British Gas and Baxi.  
  • Advising Optimise AI, the winner of the Wales Technology Awards 2024 on its £720,000 fundraising round with Development Bank of Wales as lead investor.

What our clients say

Andrew and the rest of the team at Acuity have been an incredible support in reaching this next phase of growth at HealthKey. We look forward to working with Acuity as we continue to change the way healthcare is paid for and widen access to health-related information and life-improving services so that people can be proactive about their health.

Awards

The Start-ups Team is ranked Tier 1 in the Legal 500 

The Start-ups Team is ranked Band 1 by Chambers and Partners 

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