Sunil Rai

Sunil Rai is a senior partner in Dentons Rodyk’s Corporate practice group. He is co-head of the Venture Tech & Emerging Growth Companies practice group. He is also the Singapore-India relationship partner focusing on outbound and inbound India-related transactions.

Sunil concentrates his practice in corporate and transactional matters encompassing investments and exits (buyouts, trade sales), domestic and cross border mergers and acquisitions (M&A), joint ventures, licensing, corporate governance, restructuring of entities, employment law matters including formulating stock option/ share award schemes (ESOP/ ESAS), establishing new businesses and assisting clients in drafting and reviewing contracts across a broad spectrum of various industries, verticals and government sectors. Sunil is particularly experienced in complex investment and venture-backed transactions involving multiple parties, various shareholders and parties across several jurisdictions. He enjoys acting for institutional investors (family offices, venture capital funds and private equity investors) making investments and divestments and start-ups/ early stage entities receiving investments at all stages of a company’s life-cycle - from seed stage to advanced stages such as Series D and beyond.

• Advising and assisting Luno Pte Ltd, its Founders and the Sellers (including Balderton and Naspers) in this buy-out transaction where one shareholder (Digital Currency Group), a global enterprise that builds, buys, and invests in blockchain companies, acquired all the remainder shares in Luno, a leading cryptocurrency exchange. Transaction spanned several jurisdictions and time zones (particularly UK, Singapore, Europe, Africa and New York) and that too under WFH conditions due to COVID-19.
• Validus Investment Holdings Pte Ltd: Leading, negotiating and acting for market-leading peer-to-peer lending platform Validus in its US$20m Series B+ funding round led by Vertex Growth Fund and Kuok Group’s Orion Fund. Existing investors - FMO, Vertex Ventures, Openspace Ventures, Vietnamese investment manager VinaCapital and AddVentures (an investment unit of Thailand's Siam Cement Group) also participated in this round. 
• Leading, acting for and advising Keppel Land Limited in its US$25 million equity investment in an India-based entity - Smartworks Coworking Space Pvt Ltd (“Smartworks”), a leading pan-India flexible space solutions provider with a presence in nine major Indian cities.
• Seppure Pte Ltd: Leading, advising and acting for Singapore-based chemical separation technology startup  – Seppure Pte Ltd and its founders in its seed fund-raising round worth US$2.55m which is one of the largest deals for a seed fund-raising round for a company graduating from the Entrepreneur First accelerator programme Investors in the round include SOSV, accelerator Entrepreneur First, deep tech investor SGInnovate and venture firm 500 Startups. This is one of the largest deals for a seed fund-raising round for a company graduating from the Entrepreneur First accelerator programme. The Company will use the seed funding to scale up production of chemical-resistant nanofilters and run industrial pilots with potential customers.

• Investment funds
• M&A
• Private equity
• Private equity funds
• Real estate funds

• Financial services
• Healthcare
• Investment management
• Pharma and life sciences
• Tech and telecoms

• Singapore

• Law Society of Singapore
• Singapore Academy of Law
• University of Manchester Alumni Association of Singapore

• MBA (Global), University of Manchester, (2014)
• LLB (Hons), National University of Singapore, (2005)