2024 DIVERSITY DATABASE UNDERWRITER Gunderson Dettmer Stough Villeneuve Franklin & Hachigian, LLP

Gunderson Dettmer Stough Villeneuve Franklin & Hachigian is a Silicon Valley firm at heart, though it has long outgrown its boutique status. The firm has expanded throughout the United States and internationally over the past 15 years. With offices in Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Austin, Beijing, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, São Paulo, Silicon Valley, and Singapore and extensive work in Latin America, the firm is an international specialist in emerging growth market matters for corporate and venture capital clients.

Emerging Growth Market, Boom or Bust

In 1995, Bob Gunderson, Scott Dettmer, and four other partners started a Silicon Valley firm immediately prior to the region’s technology boom. In the subsequent five years, the firm exploded alongside the region’s dotcoms and startups, growing to 130 attorneys by the year 2000. Gunderson Dettmer maintained an impressive client list and a reputation as a go-to technology and life sciences firm in a climate in which other tech-focused firms failed to thrive. Its success was at least partially achieved through its ride on another boom: the growth equity and venture capital boom. The firm now enjoys a leading share of the market for venture capital fund legal work. Chambers International, FinanceAsia, PitchBook, The Legal 500, and U.S. News have all recognized the firm for both its venture capital and technology law practices.

Corporate Giants

Today, Gunderson Dettmer serves the venture capital market and counsels startups through its corporate governance, data privacy, employment and labor, executive compensation, growth equity, M&A, public companies/public offerings, strategic transactions and licensing, tax, and venture capital and growth equity fund formation and operations practices. The firm prides itself in representing clients “in every stage of a company’s life cycle—from formation through maturity, acquisition, or transition into public equity markets and beyond.”

In the acquisitions market, the firm has helped negotiate the sale of companies to tech goliaths such as Adobe, Cisco, IBM, Meta, OpenAI, Slack, and Uber; pharmaceutical companies such as Amgen, Eli Lilly, GSK, and Johnson & Johnson; and retail giants such as Amazon and Walmart. Gunderson Dettmer clients have included companies such as Addepar, Anduril, Cityblock, Colossal Biosciences, Cohesity, Daily Harvest, Figure AI, Learneo, and Reco RoomNotCo and venture funds such as 8VC, Accel, Benchmark, Eclipse VC, Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital. 

AI-Powered Legal Service Delivery for the Innovation Economy

Gunderson Dettmer stands at the forefront of AI-powered legal service delivery tailored for the innovation economy. Through a strategic, multiyear focus on generative AI, the firm has reimagined how legal services are delivered to the world’s leading startups, venture funds, and growth companies. The firm’s GDHQ collaboration platform serves as a virtual headquarters, integrating advanced AI tools such as DeepJudge—which offers enterprise-grade semantic search and workflow automation—and Perplexity Enterprise Pro that streamline attorney and client collaboration. It also gives clients self-service access to bespoke contract generators and legal workflows initiated through SMART Requests. The firm’s achievements have garnered industry recognition, including the 2024 BIG AI Excellence Award for Generative AI, and its GDHQ platform was named the LegalTech Breakthrough Team Collaboration Platform of the Year.

• Gunderson Dettmer represented Coatue, Dragoneer, and Founders Fund as they led Anthropic’s $30.6 billion Series G financing.
• Gunderson Dettmer represented Kleiner Perkins in the formation of KP22, a $1 billion fund focused on early-stage companies and $2.5 billion to focus on growth-stage companies.
• Gunderson Dettmer represented client Statsig, a digital product testing platform, in its $1.1 billion acquisition by OpenAI. 
• Gunderson Dettmer represented Chainguard, a supply chain security software company, in its $280 million Series D financing led by General Catalyst and Octant Ventures.

• No. 1 VC Law Firm Globally for 12 consecutive years, 2025—PitchBook
• M&A Mid-Market Top Middle-Market Deals of the Year award, 2025—Mergers and Acquisitions
• Band 1 in Startups & Emerging Companies—Nationwide, 2024—Chambers 
• Band 1 in Venture Capital and Emerging Companies—Nationwide, 2025—Legal 500
• Tier 1 in Venture Capital Law—Nationwide, 2025—Best Law Firms