Insights

San Francisco – October 20, 2022: A cross-practice Crowell & Moring team represented Astra, a leading provider of advanced bank-to-bank transfer technology for financial institutions, fintech startups, and enterprises, in closing a $10 million Series A financing and securing a $30 million line of credit. The financing will support the growth of Astra’s team — with a particular focus on engineering and compliance resources — to further enable faster payments from all sources to any destination.

San Francisco–June 16, 2022: Crowell & Moring’s Emerging Companies & Venture Capital team advised Marshall Wace, a global alternative asset manager, in its investment in Elektrofi’s Series B venture capital financing transaction. The deal, which closed on May 27, marks the latest in a growing number of successful venture investment representations on behalf of Marshall Wace. With this investment, Marshall Wace continues its healthcare crossover fund strategy, which has focused on innovative developers of new biotechnology, medical device applications, and more.

On June 23, 2023, a coalition of companies, including venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst and Founders Fund, and start-up defense technology companies, published an open letter to the Department of Defense (DoD), addressed to Secretary Lloyd J. Austin, petitioning DoD to consider procurement reform to help “overcome barriers to innovation.”  The group asserts these barriers create “antiquated methods for developing requirements and selecting technologies that have drastically limited” DoD’s access to “the best commercial innovation.”  In particular, the coalition endorsed adopting four recommendations pulled from a report by The Atlantic Council, a non-partisan international affairs think tank.

On December 1, 2022, Department of Defense (DoD) Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III announced the establishment of the DoD Office of Strategic Capital (OSC).  The mission statement of the OSC is to build an “enduring technical advantage” for the United States by helping partner contractors with private investment to develop national security critical technologies, including those related to advanced materials, next-generation biotechnology, and quantum science.  OSC will coordinate with existing organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which promotes acceleration of the military use of commercial technologies.

On November 2, 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted to approve significant amendments to the exemptions from SEC registration requirements for private companies. The amendments, approved with all three Republican commissioners voting in favor and the two Democrat commissioners voting against, were described in the SEC’s press release as the “next step in the Commission’s efforts to improve the exempt offering framework for the benefit of investors, emerging companies, and more seasoned issuers.”