Venture Capital and M&A Audits
VC Due Diligence / Regulatory Audits
We bring specialised legal expertise across technology regulatory regimes that commonly affect VC portfolios and transaction targets, including:
- Artificial intelligence. Regulatory risk tied to AI governance, transparency, safety and obligations under emerging AI rules.
- Intellectual property (IP). Ownership, IP assignments, licensing risks and trade secrets.
- Antitrust / Competition law. Merger control, cartel risk, distribution and technology transfer practices, and unilateral conduct exposure.
- Privacy & data protection. GDPR, ePrivacy and industry-specific data obligations.
- Blockchain & crypto. Token classification, custody, AML obligations and regulatory licensing risk.
- Medical devices & regulated health products. Product classification, regulatory approvals, clinical-data governance and post-market obligations.
- EU digital rulebooks: Including the Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act and the EU Data Act, and their implications for platform behaviour, data access, intermediary liability and cross-border data flows.
In the rush to build products, hit growth metrics, and close funding rounds, many start-ups and scale-ups deprioritise basic compliance and governance items, leaving regulatory gaps that are invisible until they become expensive.
Left unchecked, these gaps lead to a spectrum of preventable harms, such as:
- regulatory investigations and penalties,
- injunctions that delay or block transactions,
- expensive remediation,
- unexpected liabilities for indemnities, and
- reputational damage to both the portfolio company and its investors.
For a VC firm, those harms translate directly into:
- diminished enterprise value,
- erosion of limited partners’ trust,
- difficulties in exit processes, and
- increased deal friction (longer diligence cycles, tougher warranty negotiations, escrow demands and price adjustments).
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Typical Core Deliverables
- Executive summary: A short executive summary that calls out the major 3–5 material tech/regulatory risks, the likely deal impact (timing / valuation / closing conditions), and a short recommendation (proceed / proceed with conditions / do not proceed).
- Full tech due-diligence report. Between 10–50+ pages covering scope, method, detailed findings by topic and material contracts with legal citations, evidence references, and severity ratings.
- Risk matrix. A row-level spreadsheet mapping each regulatory obligation or control (e.g., GDPR, AI Act) to the company’s current status, identified gaps, severity (high/med/low), potential regulatory consequence, and recommended remediation steps and owners.
- Contract abstracts, redlines and annotated material agreements. Annotated copies of key agreements (MSAs, DPAs, cloud/vendor agreements, reseller/customer contracts, IP assignment templates, etc) with problem clauses highlighted and suggested redlines or negotiating points.