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Mark Seneca

Partner

Silicon Valley

Mark Seneca is a Corporate partner and co-leads Orrick's M&A and Private Equity Group. He has dedicated his legal career to the M&A specialty, with experience in all aspects of mergers and acquisitions transactions involving both public and private companies in domestic and cross-border deals.

Mark has a particular focus on the technology sector, having led hundreds of buy-side and sell-side transactions involving prominent high-tech serial acquirers, unicorns and venture back companies. His sell-side work involves multiple acquisitions by Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, VMware, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Adobe, Yahoo! and Twitter. These deals include his high profile work for Mosaic ML on its US$1.3 billion acquisition by Databricks, Cruise Automation in its acquisition by General Motors, Nest Labs in its US$3.2 billion acquisition by Google, and Instagram in its US$1.0 billion acquisition by Facebook, which was ranked one of the top 10 largest valued private tech M&A deals in the U.S. in 2012. In an interview with Bloomberg Law for a “Rainmakers” episode, Mark provided a substantive analysis of the Instagram deal, including its industry precedent and influence (click here).

On the buy-side, Mark has served as lead M&A counsel for top public company acquirers (Yelp, Google, Yahoo! and Intellisync) as well as private company serial acquirers (Stripe, Pinterest and Social Finance).

  • Mark's recent engagements include:

    • Mosaic ML, a generative AI platform, in its $1.3 billion acquisition by Databricks.
    • Casetext, a legal AI firm, in its $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters,
    • Weta Digital, a visual effects company, in its $1.625 billion acquisition by Unity.
    • Cruise Automation, autonomous vehicle technology, in its acquisition by General Motors.
    • Nest Labs, manufacturer of the award-winning Learning Thermostat, in its $3.2 billion acquisition by Google.
    • Instagram, provider of a photo sharing mobile application, in its $1 billion sale to Facebook.
    • Expanse, an attack surface management platform, in its $800 million acquisition by Palo Alto Networks.
    • OpsRamp, an IT operations management service provider, in its acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company.
    • Codeacademy, an online learning platform for technical skills, in its $525 million acquisition by Skillsoft.
    • Second Spectrum, a sports AI platform, in its $200 million acquisition by Genius Sports.
    • AppSheet, a no-code enterprise app development platform, in its acquisition by Google.
    • Multinational technology company, in its acquisitions of Siri, Inc. and WiFiSlam.
    • Yelp Inc., in its sale of Eat24 LLC to GrubHub Inc. and in its acquisition of Turnstyle Analytics Inc., a Toronto-based Wi-Fi marketing company.
    • Stripe, Inc., in multiple acquisitions, including its acquisition of Index Systems, Inc., a point-of-sale software developer.
    • Nervana Systems, Inc., an artificial intelligence and deep learning technology, in its acquisition by Intel
    • Wavefront, Inc., a metrics monitoring and streaming analytics platform, in its acquisition by VMware, Inc.
    • Outward, Inc., an augmented reality 3D imaging company, in its acquisition by Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
    • Neolane S.A., a French software company in the campaign marketing space, in its $600 million acquisition by Adobe Systems Incorporated.
    • EchoSign, a provider of electronic signatures and signature automation technology, in its acquisition by Adobe Systems Incorporated.
    • Pinterest, a social networking site featuring virtual pinboard, in multiple acquisitions.
    • Goodreads Inc., the world’s largest website for readers and book recommendations, in its acquisition by Amazon Inc.