This year’s London Life Sciences Week was another fantastic opportunity to connect with innovators, investors, and industry leaders shaping the future of healthcare and biotech. The week commenced with the LSX Investival Showcase, proudly sponsored by DFIN for the seventh consecutive year—a milestone that reflects our deep commitment to the life sciences ecosystem.

In today’s fast-paced dealmaking environment, choosing the right virtual data room provider is critical. Whether you're managing domestic or cross-border M&A, fundraising, life sciences & biotech licensing, or IPOs, a secure and feature-rich VDR can deliver significant benefits to your deal.

The SEC Form F-4 is a type of registration statement that foreign companies or foreign private issuers must file in order to register certain types of securities for trading on US exchanges. This registration statement is also used for disclosures around mergers and acquisitions when a company is located outside the US.

Before companies can complete a successful merger or acquisition, they need to know what they can expect from the other party. This involves a detailed process of due diligence, or an examination of an organization’s operations, financial information and technology. For technology-driven targets, technical due diligence is one of the key steps in determining the value of the deal, as well as potential pitfalls or liabilities involved in the integration.

M&A activity is set to rise in 2025 as finance leaders leverage tech-driven strategies to navigate economic uncertainty and enhance transactions. DFIN's latest Mergers and Acquisitions 2025 Trends Survey reveals that 60% of finance decision-makers aim to boost deal activity, focusing on growth, tech acquisition, and market expansion.

Fairness opinions play a critical role in mergers and acquisitions by providing boards and stakeholders with an independent assessment of a transaction’s financial fairness. These opinions support informed, defensible decision-making, especially in high-value or high-scrutiny deals. Unlike standard valuation analyses, a comprehensive fairness opinion considers not just valuation metrics but also deal structure, market conditions and potential alternatives.

Dealmakers entered 2025 with cautious optimism, hoping that the tailwinds from late 2024 would carry through. The economic climate shifted toward volatility, with tariffs, policy shakeups, and global market swings dominating the headlines of the new year. However, as market conditions stabilized across May and June, we’ve seen encouraging trends in market activity kicking off the beginning of Q3.

When companies explore strategic consolidation, they are often faced with the decision to either pursue a merger or initiate a tender offer — two distinct pathways for combining corporate interests under a unified structure. A merger combines two entities into a single business after negotiations result in an agreement, while a tender offer involves the acquisition of one company’s shares by an acquirer that makes an offer to shareholders.

Determining the best option depends not only on what agreements the organizations can reach, but shareholder sentiment.

In today’s competitive and unpredictable market, private companies are adopting public company disciplines — from stronger governance to smarter tech investments — to attract capital, scale efficiently, and stay ahead.

This white paper, Private Companies in 2025: Scaling Through Public Practices, produced with our partner, NetSuite, explores how forward-thinking private companies are: