Getting to Know Our Funds Team

When institutional investors commit capital to a private fund, the documents they sign will govern that relationship for a decade or more. Getting the terms right at the outset, and staying on top of them afterwards, is where our funds team earns its keep. This post introduces the people behind that work and explains why we approach fund reviews, side letters and portfolio monitoring the way we do.

Who we are

Our team has advised large managers and institutional investors on commitments to some of the largest private equity and hedge funds in the world. That experience shapes everything we do. We know which terms are worth fighting for, which fallback positions a GP will actually accept, and where a seemingly technical provision hides real economic consequences.

Marcus Wolter leads the team as Global Managing Partner and CEO, based in London. Before founding Novara, Marcus spent a decade at Freshfields in Munich and Tokyo, advising on landmark cross-border transactions including Microsoft/Nokia, SoftBank/ARM and Starbucks' USD 1.3 billion East China joint venture buy-out. In addition, he has been working for top-tier private equity houses and sovereign wealth funds on their transactions and regulatory questions across the globe. He has advised on transactions worth over USD 100 billion in aggregate across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the US, with a practice spanning private equity, venture capital and cross-border M&A.

Ai-Jo Wu heads our Singapore office. Ai-Jo advises leading global PE and VC funds and sponsors, institutional investors, asset managers and growth investors, including Ant Financial and Schroders, on direct and secondary investments, financing rounds, cross-border acquisitions and restructuring across the US, Europe and Asia. Her recent work includes advising a Japanese-based global strategic investor on private equity and venture capital fund investments totalling over USD 200 million, and a leading Taiwan-based investor on fund commitments exceeding USD 100 million. Educated in Taiwan, Japan and the United States, Ai-Jo spent over nine years at Proskauer Rose and other leading international firms where she advised clients on sophisticated cross-border investment transactions. She brings a genuinely cross-cultural perspective to fund negotiations and works with clients in English and Mandarin, with conversational Japanese.

Dan O’Brien is a Senior Associate based in London. He advises venture capital investors and emerging growth companies on early-stage and growth financings. His experience includes acting for leading venture capital managers, including Bessemer Venture Partners and Finistere Ventures, on investments in high-growth companies, as well as advising international private equity clients on cross-border acquisitions and disposals of portfolio companies across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas. This deal-side perspective gives him a practical understanding of how investor protections operate within portfolio companies, and how investment terms agreed at the outset can shape value, control and downside protection throughout the life of an investment. Dan holds degrees in law and finance from the University of Otago, trained at DLA Piper, and is qualified in both England and Wales and New Zealand.

Mason Gregory is one of our senior U.S. lawyers. He is splitting his time between Tokyo and New York, reflecting the significant movements of capital between the two jurisdictions. Mason advises fund investors and managers on U.S. law and the negotiation and structuring of fund formations, investments and co-investments across borders, including domestic U.S. matters, investment into the U.S., and outbound investment from the U.S. or Japan into markets worldwide. Prior to joining Novara, Mason trained at King & Spalding, splitting his time between their U.S. headquarters and Tokyo office.

Takahiro Miyazaki is the Representative Attorney in our Tokyo Office. For approx. 10 years, he has advised the complex cross-border transactions for fund investors and managers on complex cross-border transaction involving the United States, Europe and Asia. Having worked and educated in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Vietnam, and Japan, he brings commercially grounded and strategic advice informed by on-the-ground international experience. He is admitted to practice in Japan and New York. He is a native Japanese speaker and fluent in English.

How we work: AI-driven efficiency, human judgment

What sets our fund review practice apart is the way we combine technology with market intelligence. Every fund review we produce benchmarks the fund's terms against the ILPA Principles and Model LPA, current-year market data from sources such as Preqin and Cambridge Associates, and our own experience across hundreds of fund documents. A management fee is never just summarised; it is placed against the prevailing market range. A clawback provision is never simply noted; it is tested against what investors of comparable size are achieving elsewhere.

AI runs through the whole workflow. Our tools extract and organise terms from lengthy LPAs and PPMs, flag inconsistencies between documents, surface off-market provisions and produce first drafts of side letters calibrated to a client's established negotiating positions. The result is a faster, more consistent review process that delivers higher-quality analysis at a materially lower cost than traditional manual review.

Technology, however, is only part of the process.. Every review, every flag and every side letter clause is verified and approved by a senior lawyer before it reaches a client. The technology accelerates the work; our lawyers remain responsible for every conclusion and recommendation. We believe that combination, rather than either element alone, is what enables us to deliver advice that is both more efficient and more commercially valuable.

A new offering: automated portfolio reporting and monitoring

Through Novara Global Capital, our MAS-regulated Singapore fund platform, we now offer tools that automate portfolio company reporting and monitoring in line with the underlying investment documentation. The system scans shareholders' agreements, subscription documents and side letters, extracts every reporting obligation, information right and consent requirement, and then runs the process: reporting calendars, automated follow-up when deliverables are late, and AI-driven summaries that turn incoming reports into decision-ready insight, all reviewed by our team.

In our experience, reporting and monitoring discipline is one of the most persistent weaknesses in private markets, and the gap is widest in corporate venture capital programmes and smaller VC funds. These teams are lean. There is rarely a dedicated portfolio operations function, reporting arrives in inconsistent formats or not at all, and nobody has the bandwidth to chase. Rights that were hard-won in negotiation quietly lapse into disuse.

The value lies not simply in automation, but in ensuring that negotiated protections continue to operate throughout the life of the investment. Information rights only matter if they are exercised. Reporting obligations only matter if they are monitored. By combining AI with legal oversight, we help investors convert contractual rights into a disciplined portfolio monitoring process.

The risks compound over time. Covenant breaches go unnoticed. Down rounds and dilution events pass without the investor exercising anti-dilution or pro rata rights within the applicable windows. Consent rights are ignored by portfolio companies that have learned no one is checking. Stale or missing information feeds through into valuation and audit problems at fund level. And when a dispute eventually crystallises, an investor who has not enforced its information rights for years starts from a much weaker position.

For CVCs there is a second cost that we think is underappreciated. The strategic case for corporate venture investing rests on insight: visibility into emerging technology, market signals ahead of the competition, and a pipeline of potential partnerships and acquisitions. That insight only flows if portfolio reporting actually happens and actually gets read. A CVC that does not monitor its portfolio is paying venture prices for a passive shareholding, and the parent company never receives the strategic intelligence that justified the programme in the first place.

The encouraging part is that most of this is a process problem, not a judgment problem. The obligations are already written down in the investment documents. Reading them, building the calendar, chasing the deliverables and summarising what arrives is exactly the kind of structured, repeatable work that AI handles well, with our lawyers reviewing the exceptions and anything that needs a human decision. Discipline stops depending on headcount.

Talk to us

Whether you are reviewing a fund commitment, negotiating a side letter, or looking at a portfolio that has outgrown your team's capacity to monitor it, we would be glad to help. Reach out to any member of the team to start the conversation.