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Ex-AZB Souvik Ganguly’s Acuity Law start-up closes first PE deal, gets new Mumbai office

First rain for Acuity founder Souvik Ganguly
First rain for Acuity founder Souvik Ganguly
Exclusive: Former AZB & Partners and HSA Advocates lawyer Souvik Ganguly, who started up Acuity Law late last year, has closed his first venture capital (VC) advisory transaction and taken on new office space in Mumbai.

Acuity, which currently consists of Ganguly and two associates, took on 1,200 square feet of office space in Mumbai’s Prabhadevi area, nearby ICICI Ventures’ office.

The firm also closed its first private equity transaction earlier this month, acting for start-up VC fund Plexus Capital Ventures, which invested an undisclosed minority stake in Pune energy company IRIS Energy, which handled its legal advice in-house.

Ganguly said that this first instruction was won after meeting Plexus co-founder Kunal Kumthekar through a common friend. “Within a week he said whether I’d be interested in helping an upcoming venture fund,” explained Ganguly.

He had fully set up Acuity by 1 November 2011 after having been a partner at HSA for one year and as an associate and a senior associate at AZB Mumbai between December 2005 and October 2010.

A CLC Delhi University graduate, he started his career at Anderson Legal in 2001, working in its later incarnation DSK Legal until 2004, and also worked at UK firm Trowers & Hamlins for one year in 2006 after an LLM at University College London (UCL) at the University of London.

He told Legally India that the main reason for starting out on his own was to build a firm that would give him and other partners full equity ownership, unlike most firms in India. “I learnt a lot on transactions, listed and unlisted as well as domestic and cross border in my previous assignments covering various sectors. So I wanted to set new career challenges and explore the entrepreneur in myself.”

He added that his vision for Acuity was similar to that of a lot of other start-up law firms, in that it would not be centred purely around him or his name.

Ganguly focuses exclusively on corporate, M&A and private equity work, but he said that he was particularly open to others joining in complementary practice areas. “I want to find somebody who’s good at capital markets work and has the same thought process I have that we need to take the growing pain, it’s not just about making money, and you need to reward everybody who’s making that investment.”

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