Alastair chairs our International Committee, responsible for directing Shoosmiths international strategy. He also leads our venture capital practice group and is nationally recognized for his venture capital expertise.

Alastair’s focus is on venture and growth capital, advising both institutions and companies/founders on start-up through funding rounds, M&A, and ultimately exit. He is passionate about helping clients with both day-to-day and strategic issues through their life-cycle.

Key clients include Octopus Ventures, Triple Point, Gresham House, DIF Capital, MML Capital Partners, BGF, and numerous other institutional investors in the UK and elsewhere. He also advises start-up, scaling, and expanding companies, typically technology enabled. Alastair and his team have market leading expertise in advising on investments involving Venture Capital Trust (VCT) and Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) tax complexities.

Recent experience includes advising:

• Octopus Ventures on multiple investments, including investments into Secret Escapes, Digital Shadows, Depop, Big Health and others. Alastair also advised Octopus on exits of Swiftkey to Microsoft, Evi to Amazon, Tails.com to Nestle, and Magic Pony to Twitter (X);
• Ai language processing company Speechmatics on its $62m Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity;
• Ai as a service company Faculty on its $42.5m Series B led by Apax Digital Fund;
• Oxford Capital Partners on investments including into savings platform Moneybox and insurance disrupter Wrisk;
• Harbr on its $38.5m investment round led by Dawn Capital and Tiger Global;
• Burda Principal on the Series D investment in florist Bloom and Wild;
• Triple Point on multiple disposals of solar and other energy generation assets;
• Los Angeles headquartered Global Critical Logistics on acquisitions of multiple companies outside the USA;
• MML Capital and management of Learning Curve Group on their exit to Agilitas;
• BGF and management of CAD reseller Solid Solutions Management on investment by LDC; 
• US investment bank Cowen on its leading a $61m late stage investment into biotech firm F2G;
• Amber Infrastructure, manager of the National Digital Infrastructure Fund, Equitix, and DIF Capital on investments into fibre broadband providers; and
• Oxford Nanoimaging on its Series C investment from Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI) and others.