Orrick Supports SmartUp! – The WHU Entrepreneurship Network
Sponsored Event | January.19.2018 | 12pm - 8pm ()
Orrick DüsseldorfOn January 19, 2018, we will host of young founders and corporate entrepreneurs from SmartUp! – The WHU Entrepreneurship Network for a knowledge sharing session and an introduction to venture capital deal terms in our Düsseldorf office. The session will be part of SmartUp!’s first city tour to Düsseldorf.
“SmartUp! is a well-established and successful entrepreneurship network. After they have successfully established startup tours to Berlin, Hamburg and Düsseldorf we are happy that they are now coming to Düsseldorf and will gladly share our insights with respect to legal pitfalls to avoid in the early phases of a young company and how to protect the company’s ability to attract venture capital financing later on,” says Dr. Sven Greulich, partner in our Technology Companies Practice and a WHU alumni himself.
Practice:
- Technology & Innovation Sector
- Mergers & Acquisitions
- Technology Companies Group
Dr. Sven Greulich, LL.M. (Cantuar), EMBA Partner
Düsseldorf
His clients include technology companies of all stages as well as venture capital and corporate venture capital investors. Together with an international and interdisciplinary team, he also supports scaleups and multinationals in their expansion projects, with a particular focus on cross-border transactions between Germany and the USA.
Sven’s goal is to build bridges for his clients between Germany, Silicon Valley, and other international technology hubs, helping them achieve successful growth in the global market. His legal and business background, entrepreneurial spirit, and experience from more than 400 financing rounds and M&A projects across various industries enable him to fully understand his clients’ strategic and commercial objectives and to develop creative solutions to achieve them.
Sven volunteers with entrepreneur groups at the WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management, the RWTH Aachen, the Technical University of Munich and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; he regularly lectures at the WHU and the RWTH incubation and innovation centers. In 2020, he launched the Founder Legal Boot Camp, a unique free-of-charge seminar program that educates aspiring founding teams from technical and business universities about all relevant legal pitfalls in the areas of company formation, financing, and the initial growth phase. Organized in collaboration with Germany’s leading startup universities, the Founder Legal Boot Camp now takes place three times a year in Düsseldorf, Munich, and alternately in Karlsruhe/Stuttgart.
Sven's work has been repeatedly awarded, inter alia
- Chambers ranks him as one of the top 3 venture capital lawyers in Germany (2025);
- the leading German market publication JUVE - since 2019 - ranks Sven as one of Germanyʹs top 15 attorneys for venture capital, the highest recognition for this category awarded by JUVE (2025/2026);
- Legal500 Deutschland includes Sven as “frequently recommended” for M&A (mid-sized deals) as well as private equity (mid-sized deals) and ranks him as a “leading partner” for venture capital (2025); and
- Handelsblatt/Best Lawyers list Sven as a Best Lawyer in the category Venture Capital (2025), and Sven also received their award "Venture Capital Lawyer of the Year – Western Germany" (2025); and
- in the 2017 edition of its Innovative Lawyers Report Europe, the Financial Times named Svenʹs work to connect start-ups with Germanyʹs Mittelstand (mid-sized companies) a standout “for making bridges between Silicon Valley and Germany”.