Revealed: The Growth List 2025 – The Lawyer

Welcome to The Lawyer’s Growth List in association with Wilson Sonsini.

Meet the in-house lawyers at the top of their game – and making waves in their industries. The list recognises lawyers in venture capital and tech-orientated companies, who are key to driving growth.

Rini Banerjee, fractional general counsel, Geneva

Banerjee began her career at Freshfields, where she qualified as a distressed debt restructuring lawyer, before moving in-house and holding roles at AstraZeneca, the London Stock Exchange and Endemol. Keen to be closer to strategy and decision-making, she entered venture capital over a decade ago with Index Ventures. Since then, she has built her own practice as a fractional general counsel, working with clients including Transition, Cabrit Capital, Queen, Aperture, Outlier Grove and others.

She runs a fully remote, one-woman practice, deliberately lean for efficiency and sustainability. Without a team to delegate to, she leans heavily on AI tools, prompts and playbooks to scale her output, while keeping final judgement in her own hands. Her remit mirrors that of a full-time GC: fundraising (three fund closes in the past year), fund operations, regulatory management, portfolio support and transactions from pre-seed to growth stage.

Her recent work has spanned a wide range of sectors from climate tech and defence, to space, AI, gaming, blockchain and fintech. She has supported investments into wildfire-fighting drone technology, safe battery storage, optical processors for AI and privacy-first microloans. The breadth of sectors creates opportunities for cross-fertilisation: lessons from blockchain deals can apply to regulated energy transactions, while defence use-cases emerge from climate tech innovations. Much of her work focuses on companies tackling real-world problems: from energy affordability, to waste reduction and sustainability.

She works with external firms including Taylor Wessing in Germany, Latham & Watkins in the UK and Goodwin in the US, seeking pragmatic advice and flexible fee structures for lean funds. Focusing on the future, her priorities include helping emerging funds build resilience from day one, embedding ESG and impact into fund structures, and continuing to refine the fractional GC model she has developed – including launching verticals.

Mitzi Berberi, general counsel, Kiwi.com, London

Mitzi Berberi’s career has been defined by navigating disruptive business models and translating them into sustainable growth. After qualifying into litigation and corporate insurance, she moved in-house to a Canadian company that pioneered the licensing of international television formats. At a time when there was no clear legal framework for protecting ideas, she developed arguments that helped legitimise and scale a new industry. She went on to senior roles at Fox and then Uber, where she gained first-hand experience of the pressures and opportunities of high-growth, technology-driven businesses.

Now at Kiwi.com, she has a mandate to build a legally sustainable framework for a business that is challenging traditional airlines and travel agents. Her remit spans governance, compliance and strategy, and her team has expanded from 10 to around 30 as the company scaled internationally. Her leadership was critical in preparing Kiwi.com for private equity investment, aligning legal and commercial priorities to make the business attractive to new partners.

She has worked on developing the Kiwi Guarantee, an innovative product designed to relieve traveller anxieties by offering protection against disruptions such as missed connections. This saw close collaboration across legal, product and compliance to balance customer protection with commercial reality.

This year, Berberi transitioned into the role of chief business development officer, having previously been its chief legal officer. Today she leads Kiwi.com’s strategic partnerships, working closely with airlines and increasingly with live-event companies to expand customer reach and build long-term commercial resilience. She continues to oversee legal from a governance perspective, delegated day-to-day management to avoid conflicts of interest and ensure clear accountability.

Harry Borovick, general counsel, Luminance, London

In 2025, Luminance secured one of the UK’s largest AI software fundraises to date, raising $75m and bringing in new US investors. For general counsel Harry Borovick, the deal was a huge milestone: it fuelled the company’s global expansion, opening offices in New York, Canada, Singapore, Australia and Madrid, and required him to navigate the legal complexities of building teams and operations in multiple jurisdictions.

Borovick, who now leads a four-strong legal function, has embedded himself at the centre of the business. He sits with Luminance’s product and R&D teams to ensure that legal considerations flow naturally into innovation rather than slowing it down. That proximity has helped launch functionalities such as risk highlighter Deep Insight and Lumi Go, which automates NDA workflows. More than 700 organisations across 70 countries now use Luminance’s technology, including Rolls-Royce, AMD, Hitachi, SiriusXM and Lamborghini, as well as over a quarter of the world’s top 100 law firms.

The past year has also seen Borovick deepen his academic footprint. He published AI and the Law: A Practical Guide, contributed to several books, and lectured on AI governance at Stanford, UC Law San Francisco and King’s College London. For him, curiosity is not optional: he reads technical AI research, experiments with coding tools and spends time with engineers to fully grasp the technology his company builds.

His priority now is supporting Luminance’s North American growth trajectory, where the company is rapidly becoming the AI platform of choice for large enterprises.

Anna Crosse, general counsel, Vorboss, London

Anna Crosse took an untraditional route into scale-up life. She trained in-house at EDF Energy, gaining early exposure to some of the UK’s biggest corporate transactions, including the £5.8bn sale of UK Power Networks and the £12.5bn sale of British Energy. That grounding in complex, board-level deals was followed by a move into private practice at Dundas & Wilson (now CMS), before nearly a decade at Johnson Matthey, where she advised global businesses on compliance and regulation in sustainable technologies.

She joined Vorboss as its first general counsel when the telecoms scale-up, backed by Octopus Investments with £250m in funding, was a 20-person business. As Vorboss expanded to more than 400 staff and became London’s leading business internet provider and one of the largest fibre infrastructure companies, Crosse has scaled the legal function in step. The team has grown to eight lawyers and paralegals at its largest size, spanning commercial, operational, regulatory and governance work, with two lawyers mid-way through their SQE qualification. Closely embedded with the executive team, she works with the CEO and COO to ensure legal helps to deliver strategy at pace.

Her remit covers everything from corporate transactions to contract innovation. In June/July 2025 she led on three multimillion-pound acquisitions that all completed within a month of each other, supported by Squire Patton Boggs. She has restructured company agreements to be concise, shorter, clearer and fairer, and automated to allow the business to self-serve seamlessly, reducing negotiation time and improving customer trust. She also introduced an automatic service compensation model to reinforce accountability and transparency.

Crosse has also shown how legal can be a driver of people-first culture. Her initiatives include negotiating contracts to create proper uniforms for women in engineering roles, developing welfare vans with sanitary facilities, and improving childcare support and bursaries to widen access to interviews. She also implemented new, easy-to-read employment contracts that every employee can understand – a move designed to strengthen trust and inclusivity across the workforce.

Alexia Delahousse, general counsel, Qonto, Paris

Alexia Delahousse started her career in M&A, spending nearly a decade advising on cross-border transactions before pivoting into fintech. In 2018 she joined Ledger, the blockchain and cybersecurity unicorn, where she built her first in-house team. That role introduced her to Qonto’s founders, who were preparing to expand their digital banking platform and needed someone to establish the legal function.

Delahousse joined Qonto as its first general counsel when the company had around 100 employees and a single product. Six years on, she leads a team of around 30 spanning legal, public affairs and CSR, and supporting a business of 1,700 employees operating across eight European jurisdictions. Her work covers the full lifecycle of growth: corporate fundraising up to Series D, M&A transactions, governance and regulatory oversight, and increasingly public policy. She has built a lobbying and public affairs practice from scratch, with a daily focus on monitoring EU and national regulation, and ensuring Qonto’s product launches are not blocked by red tape.

Major milestones this year include steering Qonto’s April 2025 filing for a French credit institution licence, a cross-functional effort that will transform the company from a payment institution into a bank. She also represents Qonto in European lobbying initiatives, pushing for a “28th regime” to harmonise corporate law across the EU.

Her priorities now are guiding Qonto through its banking licence transition, integrating further M&A opportunities, and ensuring the company can scale sustainably as it targets millions more SME customers across Europe.

Gabrielle Dorais, general counsel, Sorare, Paris

When Sorare closed its $680m Series B in 2021, one of the biggest raises in European tech that year, the company needed a legal leader who could match its ambitions. Gabrielle Dorais stepped in as its first general counsel and quickly became a central figure in shaping the crypto gaming unicorn’s future.

A Canadian-qualified lawyer with an LLM in law and technology from UC Berkeley, Dorais had already built her career across litigation, multinational corporates and fast-moving tech businesses including Yellow Pages, Criteo, Ubisoft and Diffusely (formerly Meero). At Sorare she built the legal team from scratch, establishing the frameworks for web3 products where no precedents existed. Working side by side with engineers and product managers, her team drafted the company’s first terms and privacy policies, making sure the legal foundations evolved in tandem with the technology.

Dorais has led on some of Sorare’s most important commercial deals, negotiating licensing agreements with the NBA, MLB, Premier League, LaLiga, LFP and Serie A, as well as partnerships with Serena Williams, Kylian Mbappé and Zinedine Zidane. She has also guided the company through fast-shifting regulation, managing litigation across multiple jurisdictions, and helping to secure France’s first web3 gaming law, JONUM, while influencing policy debates in the US and EU.

Today, Dorais is Sorare’s chief business and legal affairs officer, overseeing a team of more than 20 spanning legal, policy, HR and business development. Under her leadership, lawyers are embedded with product and commercial functions, some in dual roles that bridge legal with business. Her trajectory reflects the scale of her impact making legal a platform for growth.

Tobias Haar, general counsel, Aleph Alpha, Heidelberg/Berlin

For Tobias Haar, working on the crosslines of law and technology has always been home turf. He built a career spanning private practice, videogames, crypto and traveltech before stepping into AI. By the time he joined Germany-based AI company Aleph Alpha in April 2023, he had already spent a decade handling the kind of novel legal questions that arise when regulation doesn’t quite keep pace with fast-moving tech. The business boasts customers such as Siemens and the German armed forces.

Haar’s arrival coincided with a turning point for Aleph Alpha. Within months, he was lobbying in Brussels and Berlin for workable regulation in the run-up to the EU AI Act and structuring a landmark financing that secured $500m in funding – one of the largest ever for a European AI business. Those projects cemented his role not just as GC, but also as head of public affairs, investor relations and part of the extended management team. He now leads a five-strong legal function, recruited from major firms including Hengeler Mueller, Menold Bezler and Baker McKenzie.

Aleph Alpha’s pivot from building frontier models to an enterprise AI operating system has kept Haar’s team busy drafting novel contractual clauses around data privacy, IP and regulatory compliance. His philosophy is that core capabilities must sit in-house, while specialist matters such as corporate finance, antitrust or tax are handed to trusted advisers like PwC Legal, Osborne Clarke and Berlin boutique Blomstein.

Priorities for the coming year include continuing to translate the complexities of AI regulation into practical guidance, as well as making sovereign, compliant AI a selling point. With Aleph Alpha having scaled from 50 employees to more than 300 since his arrival, and with Berlin and Heidelberg as its hubs, he is focused on ensuring that the company stays ahead of regulators, investors and competitors alike.

Pola Karolczyk, general counsel, Cowboy, Brussels

Pola Karolczyk has always seen law as a way to get closer to technology. Starting her career in Poland, she pursued an LLM at Berkeley focused on law and technology, gaining exposure to Silicon Valley’s innovation ecosystem. From there, she joined Sidley Austin in Brussels, where she built her litigation skills on high-profile competition cases before the European Commission and courts in Luxembourg, and gained a grounding in the policy and lobbying work that shapes European regulation. Her in-house career has seen her work for eBay and later Apple, which eventually led her to scale-up Cowboy in 2023.

Cowboy is a company in transition: after the Covid-driven boom in e-bikes faded, the industry was left with overcapacity, falling prices and a fight to survive. Without a large industrial backer, Cowboy has had to be agile, and legal has been central to that. Karolczyk joined as the company’s first GC and quickly expanded into head of people, board secretary and investor relations lead. In less than two years she has settled complex IP litigation, worked on its €5m funding round, overseen a switch to a new bike assembler, managed Cowboy’s first multi-jurisdictional recall and is now leading negotiations with a prospective industrial partner. Each of these moves has been key in stabilising the company and positioning it for long-term viability.

Her role shows how core legal can be in a pivoting business model. She describes herself as moving in step with Cowboy’s priorities, shaping the legal function around what matters most at a given moment.

Alongside Cowboy, Karolczyk also serves on the supervisory board of a Polish EV charging start-up developing ultra-fast charging technology, another chance to combine law, technology and green industry at scale.

Florian Köhler, group general counsel, Helsing SE, Munich

Helsing, in Munich, is where artificial intelligence is being applied to defence and national security. Its technology has already been tested in the skies, powering AI-assisted flights of fighter jets like the Gripen. Germany and other NATO allies on the eastern flank rely on its drones to provide deterrence capabilities. And beneath the surface, the company has designed autonomous underwater vehicles that use swarm intelligence to patrol critical infrastructure, including the Baltic Sea’s cable networks.

Into this environment marched Florian Köhler, who joined the disruptive venture after a career spent in what he calls the “old economy” of heavy industry and traditional processes. Now, he is charged with building a legal framework agile enough for the velocity of war-time innovation, guarding compliance and export controls in a business where the movement of goods, data and technology across borders can tip geopolitical scales. Much like any startup GC, his work is as broad as the company’s ambitions. On any given day, he might be drafting employment contracts, negotiating supplier and customer agreements, or steering M&A activity (Helsing acquired three companies last year, including a lightweight aeroplane manufacturer in southern Germany). The difference from most GCs, however, is that every clause he signs off is freighted with the weight of war.

Köhler sees Europe as running out of time to prepare itself, and together with Helsing he wants to ensure the continent is ready for a potential Russian aggressor. So much so, the company — initially a software specialist — expanded into hardware in response to Europe’s changing security landscape. The founders saw they could contribute more, and so did Köhler. Looking ahead, his focus is on scaling the legal team and deepening its capacity. The challenge is to keep the legal function ahead of the company’s breakneck growth, ensuring it can deliver products that Europe’s armed forces may soon rely on.

Miyu Lee, general counsel, Mondu, Berlin

Vienna-born Miyu Lee has always looked for ways to connect law with economics. After beginning her career at Wolf Theiss while studying, she qualified into Cleary Gottlieb’s Frankfurt office, working on M&A, IPOs and competition matters. A Harvard LLM and the New York Bar followed, before she moved in-house to Hyundai, where she navigated regulatory changes across Europe. Her interest in the economic rationale behind regulation led her to complete a PhD in economics at Humboldt University, a perspective she says sharpened her ability to give practical advice.

That blend of legal and economic training set her up for Berlin’s emerging tech scene. She joined mobility start-up Blacklane, then moved into payments at Billpay and Klarna. At Klarna, she oversaw product legal, regulatory operations and licensing work, supporting the company’s expansion across Europe. In 2022 she took on a new challenge at Mondu, a B2B payments scale-up, where she was hired to establish the legal and compliance function from the ground up.

Since then, Lee has guided Mondu through its biggest milestones, including securing a European e-money licence from the Dutch central bank – a process that stretched over two years and tested every corner of the business. Her team of four now covers everything from compliance to product structuring, while she has also steered the company through financing rounds, including a €50m package from VVRB.

On external support, she relies on Nauta in the Netherlands for licensing and YPOG for capital raising. Looking forward, Lee sees both promise and pressure in the rise of AI: her team already experiments with automation to cut repetitive work, yet she warns of Europe’s mounting regulatory layers. For Mondu, which now operates in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and Austria, the task ahead is to scale across borders without losing the agility that first defined it.

Jing Wei Luo, head of legal and operations, Meridian Health Ventures, London

When Jing Wei Luo joined Meridian Health Ventures in December 2023, the fund had just closed its first round. Since then, the NHS-backed venture firm has raised £30m, launched its Innovations in Mental Health fund (IMH), and begun scaling a model that blends venture capital with healthcare adoption.

Originally created as a corporate joint venture owned by NHS trusts, Meridian quickly proved that the health service could back innovation. It has since transitioned into a traditional GP–LP fund structure, drawing in investors such as Cedars-Sinai, Hartford Healthcare, General Catalyst, SpeedInvest and the Wellcome Trust. That shift has enabled portfolio companies not only to pilot products through the NHS but also to access international markets.

Luo straddles legal and operations. His remit ranges from overseeing investments and fund formation to handling compliance, governance and IT support. He also sits as a board observer across the portfolio. A key milestone has been preparing Meridian for its own FCA licence, a move that will streamline operations and cut costs, while also continuing to scale the IMH fund and its accelerator-style immersion programmes run with the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust.

In its first year, Meridian has invested in around 10 companies, from Apian’s hospital drone logistics to digital diagnostics and AI-powered therapy platforms. Its first impact report showed these companies had already reached more than 1 million patients. For Luo, balancing NHS impact priorities with financial returns is the crux of the role: “We believe you can do good and also do good financially.”

On external support, he turns to firms including McDermott, Mishcon de Reya, Withers and Taylor Wessing, preferring pragmatic, responsive advice over lengthy analysis. He sees AI as an efficiency tool in law but not a replacement for human judgement. Looking ahead, his focus is on securing Meridian’s FCA licence, finalising the IMH fund’s close and supporting portfolio companies to their next financing milestones. “The fund itself is almost like a startup,” he says. “That’s what I really enjoy.”

Deirdre MacCarthy, chief legal officer and head of people, Wayflyer, Dublin

Deirdre MacCarthy has spent her career taking growth companies through complex legal challenges. She trained at Arthur Cox and later became a partner at Maples in the firm’s market-leading growth companies practice. Her client roster was dominated by investors and entrepreneurs, including Wayflyer itself, which gave her a front-row view of Ireland’s emerging fintech scene. In 2020 she made the unusual move from partnership into scale-up life, joining Wayflyer as its first CLO.

Two years later, when the head of people role opened, MacCarthy was asked to take it on alongside legal. She now leads a team of 25 across legal, compliance and people, and has been central to Wayflyer’s evolution into one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintechs. The business has deployed more than $5bn in working capital to 5,000 e-commerce brands worldwide and grown to over 300 employees, with offices in Dublin, New York, London and Sydney.

On the legal side, her coverage spans board support, investor relations and navigating the complex facilities that underpin Wayflyer’s lending products. She has guided the business through new product launches, including multi-fund loan structures designed to be both customer-friendly and robust enough to meet the requirements of institutional lenders such as JP Morgan. Her team works with product from day one, ensuring documentation is clear, enforceable and easy for customers ranging from small online shops to enterprises with hundreds of millions in revenue. She also led legal on Wayflyer’s first US acquisition, MadeMeBuyIt, earlier this year, giving the company a foothold in inventory marketplace technology and advancing its US expansion strategy.

MacCarthy has overseen Wayflyer’s recovery from the difficulties of 2022, which saw the company make lay-offs, to now reaching its fifth anniversary and deploying $5bn in capital to over 5,000 businesses. Her focus ahead is on supporting Wayflyer’s US expansion, integrating acquisitions like MadeMeBuyIt and preparing the company for its next phase of multi-product growth.

Tom McGinn, general counsel, Northzone, London

Tom McGinn joined Northzone in 2021, just ahead of the firm’s most recent €1bn fundraise – one of the largest in European venture capital at the time. As the fund’s first and only legal hire, he has built a function designed to support Northzone’s cross-Atlantic platform, which spans London, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, New York and Oslo.

McGinn’s route into venture began in private practice. After training at Osborne Clarke and a secondment to Microsoft where he served as legal lead for its UK retail and consumer business, he joined Cooley in London at a time when the latter was still establishing its European high-growth practice. There he spent four years advising founders, investors and scale-ups on financing rounds, exits and expansions, and saw first-hand how US venture norms were reshaping dealmaking across Europe.

McGinn first came to know the Northzone team while working on a co-investment with Atomico in Spacemaker, later sold to Autodesk. That relationship led to an organic move across when the opportunity arose to become Northzone’s first legal hire.

Northzone’s portfolio is among the strongest in Europe, with landmark successes including early investments in Spotify, Klarna, Personio and Spring Health. McGinn works to keep legal closely tied to the fund’s investment DNA: enabling deals to move quickly while aligning stakeholders for the long term. From guiding companies through financings, governance challenges, to structuring vehicles and negotiating LP terms, his role has wide reach.

To support its wide-ranging work and portfolio, Northzone works with a curated roster of external counsel across jurisdictions, including Marriott Harrison (UK), Lowenstein Sandler (USA), Cooley (USA and UK), DLA (Nordics), MAQS (Sweden), YPOG and LARK (Germany), NautaDutilh and Ingen Housz (the Netherlands), Hogan Lovells (France), Uría (Spain) and Cytowski & Partners (Delaware flips).

Now, McGinn is busy preparing Northzone for its next fundraise and accommodating an increasingly international LP base. His role is to enable investors and founders to stay aligned through the most critical stages of growth.

Ciarán McGonagle, general counsel, Tokenovate, London

At Tokenovate, Ciarán McGonagle is building the legal and product architecture for Tokenovate, a fintech developing the next generation of infrastructure for tokenised derivatives and repo markets.

Joining as the company’s first legal hire, McGonagle has designed the frameworks that make Tokenovate’s platform possible as its chief legal and product officer. His role has seen him help create its token issuance model, draft the documentation that underpins its products, and develop a novel structure for using tokenised collateral in financial markets: simply put, translating centuries-old concepts of contract and property law into a digital environment.

His approach reflects experience built earlier in his career at Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank, before moving to ISDA, the global trade association for derivatives. At ISDA he was central to the industry’s digital transformation, working on the Common Domain Model, a blueprint for automated derivatives that still shapes how markets operate today. That grounding gave him a unique perspective when he moved to Tokenovate: a lawyer who had helped set industry rules now building the products that put them into practice.

The legal team at Tokenovate is woven into product design from the outset. Every feature is built with enforceability, compliance and resilience in mind, reducing friction, and giving both clients and regulators confidence in the system. Over the past year, he has also prepared Tokenovate for its next fundraising, secured strategic partnerships and overseen the imminent launch of its V2 platform.

Externally, he chairs FINOS’s Tokenisation Working Group, engages with regulators in London and Brussels, and has helped shape industry standards.

Thomas Dallas McSorley, general counsel, NATO DIANA, London

Thomas Dallas McSorley began his career in Washington, first teaching and then practising law in public procurement and national security at a time when those disciplines were just emerging as their own field. After a stint at SpaceX – joining just as the company began landing rockets – he returned to private practice advising aerospace and tech clients before moving in-house again at software start-up Rebellion Defence. By 2022, when NATO launched its Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), McSorley was ready to bring that mix of national security, start-up and tech expertise to London.

Joining as the second permanent employee, he has helped transform DIANA from a small transition team into an 80-strong agency with offices in London, Tallinn and beyond. His mandate is broad: building the organisation’s legal frameworks from scratch, shaping its procurement structures, and ensuring DIANA can bridge the gap between NATO allies and commercial innovators. Under his leadership, the legal team has delivered hundreds of contracts and MOUs, developed a pan-alliance legal support network for start-ups, and embedded a culture of speed and flexibility into NATO’s traditionally rigid procurement processes.

Highlights so far include structuring DIANA’s accelerator programmes, which have attracted double the number of applications this year compared to last, and simplifying the path for start-ups to deliver dual-use technologies to NATO militaries. McSorley also works closely with policymakers in Brussels, Berlin and Washington on the EU AI Act, export control and security clearance issues. External law firms play a limited but important role, supporting DIANA’s unique needs as an international organisation operating under treaty law. McSorley’s role will continue to be combining NATO’s scale with start-up urgency.

Laila Myksvoll, general counsel, reMarkable, Oslo

Laila Myksvoll’s route into the scale-up world came after a decade in large corporates and technology companies, where she advised on complex transactions and navigated the challenges of international growth. Following a major merger while working at a seismic technology company, she was ready for a new chapter in a high-growth environment – and the opportunity at reMarkable arrived at exactly the right time.

Since joining the Norwegian consumer electronics company, Myksvoll has built an eight-person legal team covering corporate, tax, intellectual property, risk, compliance, contracts and legal operations. The company reached a $1bn valuation back in 2022, with Myksvoll joining in 2023. The team’s multidisciplinary structure ensures that reMarkable can keep its core legal work in-house while drawing on firms such as Thommessen, Selmer and Kvale for specialist support in Norway, and international firms for tariff or IP enforcement matters.

The past year has been a pivotal one. Myksvoll and her team played a central role in the successful September launch of the reMarkable Paper Pro Move, the company’s newest tablet. Legal’s involvement stretched across the entire product cycle: securing IP rights, protecting confidentiality during development, ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks in multiple jurisdictions, and aligning contractual terms with suppliers and distributors. The launch was widely covered in international media and marked a milestone in the company’s expansion beyond its flagship e-paper devices.

Her remit also extends to guiding reMarkable through geopolitical uncertainty and shifting consumer sentiment. As a global brand, the company must constantly adapt to regulatory and trade developments, and Myksvoll’s team plays a critical role in anticipating risks and shaping strategy.

Over the coming year, her focus will be on sustaining reMarkable’s growth while maintaining agility, from streamlining legal processes to support product innovation, ensuring resilience against external shocks, and continuing to develop the team as an integral partner in the business.

Rhian Saleh, general counsel, Phoenix Court, London

Rhian Saleh trained at Pinsent Masons in Scotland before moving to London, where stints at Sheridans and Orrick exposed her to the full lifecycle of venture capital. The fast pace of early-stage financing and the chance to work with founders building products she used in her own life convinced her to leave behind the world of big-ticket energy deals. By 2021 she was ready to move in-house, joining Phoenix Court as its first lawyer and stepping into the heart of Europe’s innovation economy.

Today, as general counsel at Phoenix Court, Saleh oversees its flagship seed and pre-seed fund LocalGlobe, alongside its other funds Latitude, Solar and Basecamp. The group includes 25 unicorns and boasts 50 of its scale-ups generating more than £10bn in annual revenue.

The past year has seen her help structure deeptech investments, support fintech and AI companies navigating fast-evolving regulatory regimes, and design governance frameworks that give founders confidence to adopt new technologies responsibly. She is often balancing immediate queries from portfolio companies, such as negotiating clauses with co-investors or interpreting policy announcements from Westminster, with long-term fund structuring projects on the go. Saleh also manages the challenges of working in an ever-evolving regulatory landscape and trying to work through efficient solutions for Phoenix Court’s portfolio companies.

Looking ahead, her focus is on enabling Europe’s scale-up stage. With more than 2,000 venture-backed companies across EMEA now generating revenues above €25m but facing a £57bn funding gap, she sees legal’s role as creating resilient structures that channel long-term growth capital. At the same time, she works closely with Phoenix Court Works, the group’s charitable foundation that reinvests profits into community initiatives, ensuring the benefits of the tech economy are more widely shared.

Rosie Teo, general counsel, Tillo, London

After qualifying at Macfarlanes where she focused on private equity and corporate transactions, Rosie Teo made the leap in-house in 2018 when she became the first lawyer at Salary Finance. Over six years she built its legal function from scratch, rising to general counsel, and then chief legal and compliance officer. That high-growth experience prepared her well for her current role as the first general counsel at digital gift card network Tillo, which she joined last year.

At Tillo, Teo leads a legal team of three and reports into the CEO, with a remit that spans everything from corporate strategy to international expansion. Her first challenge was to mature the function quickly in order to support a major secondary transaction with growth equity investor Tenzing Capital. The deal enabled the exit of Passion Capital and early angel investors, and stood out because Tillo had scaled profitably since its £1.4m pre-seed round nine years ago without raising additional capital. Teo worked closely with Simmons & Simmons on due diligence and negotiations for Tenzing, and Osborne Clarke that advised Tillo’s management.

Tillo, which grew sales of digital gift cards by 50 per cent last year, is now doubling down on international expansion, with operations across 37 countries and a particular push into the US. For Teo, that means balancing corporate strategy with product counselling and adapting contracting frameworks to fit multiple jurisdictions.

But she also emphasises the importance of efficiency: her proudest achievement has been implementing a data-driven legal function, measuring effectiveness and experimenting with AI tools. Rather than adopting off-the-shelf legaltech, her team has built its own solutions using platforms like Zapier, ChatGPT and Gemini to cut down on repetitive work.

Dina White, general counsel, Zodia Markets, London

Dina White trained at Clifford Chance and spent 6 years at BNY Mellon, first in corporate trust and later in M&A where she worked on bank-wide transactions and strategic investments. One project involved developing a central bank–backed digital asset to enable instant settlement, sparking the interest in blockchain that eventually led her to Zodia Markets.

Since joining the Standard Chartered–backed crypto trading business in 2021, she has built its legal function into a two-person team that supports every corner of the company. Over the past year, White has led on Zodia’s $18.25m Series A fundraise, coordinating with Eversheds to bring in investors including Circle Ventures and Pharsalus Capital. She also managed the acquisition of a Jersey entity to obtain an investment business licence, secured regulatory approval in Abu Dhabi’s ADGM and guided the company through its first collateralised bitcoin loan.

She also extends into product development, where she has overseen the rapid expansion of Zodia’s stablecoin trading activity and laid the legal groundwork for payments orchestration. That includes designing structures for clients to settle trades in stablecoins or fiat, and supporting the opening of a USD account in Hong Kong to offer Asia Pacific customers faster local settlement.

With headcount growing from 15 to 50 since launch, White’s priority is ensuring Zodia can scale compliantly across multiple jurisdictions. She sees opportunities in the US, Latin America and Asia, as well as in security token products made possible through the Jersey licence. The challenge remains aligning innovative payment and trading structures with legal systems that are still catching up.

Aladin Zeghbib, general counsel, Supernova Invest, Paris

Aladin Zeghbib began his career in private practice at Paul Hastings and Weil Gotshal, working on private equity and restructuring deals. But by 2021 he was ready for something different: rather than structuring one-off LBOs, he wanted to use his transactional experience to build lasting relationships in Europe’s innovation ecosystem. That drew him to Supernova Invest, then a 17-person VC house managing just over €300m. Four years on, the team has doubled in size and assets under management now exceed €800m.

As Supernova’s first and still only lawyer, Zeghbib’s remit is broad. He cut his teeth finalising Supernova’s flagship Ambition Industrie fund on arrival and has since led three further fundraisings, including the fund’s partnership with Orano to launch a nuclear energy vehicle in 2024.

On the investment side, he recently worked on a €15m round into Italian cybersecurity scale-up Exein, led by Balderton, and oversaw a strategic divestment of Israeli medtech SoniVie, a milestone exit for Supernova’s first vintage. At the same time, Supernova has expanded its investment scope across Europe, completing more than 10 new deals: two each in Switzerland, Denmark, Italy and Belgium, plus one in each of the UK, Germany and the US. Navigating this patchwork of legal regimes has become a defining feature of his role. To get deals over the line, he turns to advisers including Chammas & Marcheteau in Paris, YPOG in Germany and Latham & Watkins in London.

Looking ahead, Zeghbib’s role is to reinforce Supernova’s position as a leading European deeptech investor in its future pursuits.