By Louis Lehot, Partner, Foley & Lardner LLP. Garage to global, since 1999.

Friends,

Big week. Here is the docket.

Last Week (Apr 20–24)

Apple succession — Mon 4/20. John Ternus, SVP Hardware Engineering, becomes Apple’s eighth CEO Sept 1. Cook to Executive Chair. Board approved Friday Apr 17. Three trading days, no leaks. Read the 8-K, the Form 4s, and the proxy that follows. If your client is public with a CEO over 60, your committee charter this quarter should look a lot like this one.

Lawyer joke I have been saving for twenty-five years: I asked the partner running our succession committee whether Cook’s new role was honorary. He said, “It is executive chair — there is a desk attached.”

Cohere / Aleph Alpha — Tue 4/21. Sovereign AI got a comparable. Watch the schedules, not the headline: training-data provenance reps, weights-residency covenants, AI Act regulatory-class allocation between buyer and target. Your next EU RFP will ask all three.

Bad pun I refuse to apologize for: sovereign AI just gave European founders something the Americans cannot regulate first — their own zip code.

Mighty Capital closes Fund III — Wed 4/22. Big congratulations to SC Moatti, Jennifer Vancini, and the Mighty Capital team on closing $91M, oversubscribed, 3x prior fund, anchored by GCM Grosvenor. Six IPOs in eight years, $1B+ delivered to LPs, a 60x outlier. Lawyer joke: the difference between “use commercially reasonable efforts” and “shall” in an LPA is roughly the difference between Fund I and Fund III.

Anthropic + Amazon — Wed 4/22. Another $5B in, up to $20B more on the line. Strategic plus exclusive cloud commitment is now the template. Whether AWS commitment dollars count as revenue, COGS, or capex offset is the IRR question your audit committee should be asking this quarter.

Google Cloud Next — Wed 4/22. Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform is the announcement. The takeaway for deal counsel is one line: the unit of AI governance is no longer the model. It is the agent. Update your MSAs and DPAs to require A2A protocol disclosure, agent registries, and per-agent activity logs.

Capital Connect: Seed to Series A in Life Sciences — Wed 4/22, Foley Palo Alto. Foley partners Antoinette Konski and Brian Wheeler with founders, investors, advisors. Three things our biotech founders heard:

🔹 Claim-construction questions cannot wait until Series A. 🔹 Milestone-based tranching is back. Clinical-readout gates, not calendar draws. 🔹 Independent-director seats at Series A — a 2018 governance posture for a 2026 risk environment.

Celebration of Justice — Wed 4/22. Foley sponsored, our partners had a table. The Law Foundation served 14,000+ individuals and families last year. The work matters.

Intel — Thu 4/23. Foundry beat, 18A in HVM, multiple major external customers signed onto TeraFab. Lawyer joke: my favorite kind of foundry case is one where the silicon actually shows up.

SF enterprise-AI growth tape — Thu 4/23. A busy afternoon for deal counsel:

🔹 Omni — AI analytics, SF — $120M Series C at $1.5B, Iconiq Growth led, includes a $30M employee tender. Secondary inside primary is now standard for AI-native growth deals where retention is the cap-table risk. 🔹 Cloudsmith — AI software supply-chain security — $72M Series C (TCV). 🔹 Orkes — agentic-workflow orchestration — $60M Series B. 🔹 AcuityMD — AI medtech data — $80M Series C. 🔹 OpenAI / Hiro Finance — acqui-hire, terms undisclosed. OpenAI’s seventh acquisition of 2026, all operator-team buys. The reps are starting to look very different from a normal acqui-hire.

Riverwood Capital LatAm Tech Forum, Miami. Foley platinum sponsor, again, of our client Riverwood. André Thiollier, Alexandre Turqueto, Tiaan de Nysschen, and I were on the ground.

🔹 LatAm-into-U.S. AI deal flow is moving faster than the headline IPO calendar suggests. 🔹 Sovereign cloud is now a real procurement category in Brazil and Mexico. 🔹 If you have not set up your U.S. holdco, the second-best time is now.

Clients in Motion

→ Mighty Capital — Fund III, as above. → Signal Labs — SignalOS “Apex” went GA Friday. → Gatik AI — first U.S. company running fully driverless commercial trucks at scale. $600M+ contracted revenue. → XY.ai — Sam De Brouwer’s agentic AI for healthcare ops. → SoundPatrol — Walter De Brouwer and Michael Ovitz’s AI-native anti-piracy lab. UMG and Sony. → Palona AI — Maria Zhang’s emotionally intelligent multi-agent systems for D2C brands. → O2G Payments — AI-driven payments and merchant analytics for SMB merchants. → Syn-apse — swarm robotics. One chassis is a demo. A swarm is a category.

And several we cannot name yet — financings and a strategic that closed last week, signed but not announced. More soon.

This Week (Apr 27–May 1)

🗓 Funders & Founders | Foley Silicon Valley. Investors and founders, candid room. RSVP via the events team.

🗓 ThinkTank Founder & Investor Dinner | Menlo Park. Hosted by Kayvan Baroumand at TheThinkTank.vc. Off-the-record, intimate roster. Deals start over the second course.

🗓 Hard Things — Thu Apr 30, 5:30 p.m. | Foley & Lardner SF. Invite-only, with Vitaly Golomb and Mavka Capital, on Physical AI. Keynote: Andrea Keay, Managing Director, Silicon Valley Robotics. Apply via Luma.

🗓 Silicon Valley GC Lunch — May 15. Off-the-record, senior in-house counsel only. Reply if you want a seat.

Deal tape to watch: Anthropic IPO whispers firming for Q4. Cerebras roadshow continuing. Microsoft and Alphabet capex disclosures Tuesday and Wednesday — the only two earnings prints the deal market actually cares about.

Closing Argument

🔹 CEOs: refresh your succession plan by Q3. 🔹 CFOs: your AI capex story is no longer optional in earnings remarks. 🔹 GCs: agent-governance framework, partner’s desk, Friday. 🔹 Investors: the AI rally just stopped being about models and started being about who controls the substrate.

Standard disclosures: opinions my own, not my firm’s. Not legal advice. Attorney advertising — prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.