Oreste Cipolla

Oreste Cipolla is a partner in Goodwin’s Private Equity group. Oreste represents private equity sponsors, venture capital funds, hedge funds, and multinational companies in a wide range of US and cross-border transactions. His practice focuses on leveraged buyouts, dispositions, joint ventures, growth equity investments, and other equity and debt financings. As a lead lawyer on both the buy and sell sides, Oreste advises clients in various industries, including technology, health care, digital infrastructure, for-profit education, gaming, and food and healthy living.

Oreste is a co-leader of Goodwin’s Secondaries Practice, a practice bringing together an international team of lawyers with extensive experience in domestic and global cross-border secondaries transactions. He is also a member of the firm’s Impact and Responsible Investing practice and Food and Healthy Living Practice.

Oreste’s recent work includes representing:

• Macquarie Capital (USA), the corporate advisory, capital markets and principal investing arm of Macquarie Group, in a number of minority equity investments and buyouts, including:
  
  • a joint venture with Prime Data Centers, a data center developer and operator delivering build-to-suit, powered-shell, and turnkey solutions to retail colocation providers, hyperscalers, and large enterprises;
  • follow-on investments in Prime Data Centers;
  • structuring of and investment in the pre-IPO convertible preferred equity financing of Laureate Education, the world’s largest network of higher-education degree-granting institutions, and subsequent IPO
• Level Equity in a number of growth investments in software and tech-enabled companies in the U.S., Europe and Australia spanning from healthcare to cloud-based services, construction and real estate management, including:
  
  • preferred equity investment in and following sale of Fusion Risk Management, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based continuity risk management software, contingency planning solutions and consulting services, and the subsequent sale of Fusion Risk Management in a leveraged buyout by another private equity firm;
  • leveraged buyout of and following sale of Ensenta Corporation, a leading provider of cloud-based enterprise deposits, payments and risk mitigation technology and services;
    
  • preferred equity investment in and following listing via a de-SPAC of Vacasa, LLC, a tech-enabled vacation rental property management company;
  • preferred equity investment in Planet DDS, a leading provider of cloud-based dental practice management and client acquisition software, and subsequent partial exit via a joint venture with Aquiline Partners;
  • preferred equity investment in Ready Education, a leading provider of a software solution aimed at creating a virtual platform tailored to engage students seamlessly between mobile and desktop, and its continued expansion in North America and Europe
• Danone Manifesto Ventures, the venture capital arm of Danone, the global food and beverage multinational company, in a number of equity and debt investments in food and food tech businesses that are disrupting the world's eating and drinking habits and changing the way companies engage with consumers
• Primus Capital in a number of acquisitions and dispositions in North America, including:
  
  • sale of AOD Software, a provider of software solutions to continuing care retirement communities and other long-term care facilities;
  • sale of Vendormate, Inc., a provider of vendor relationship management solutions for healthcare providers
• Stone Canyon Industries in its leveraged buyout, and subsequent sale of, Fleishman’s Vinegar Company, the world's largest manufacturer and marketer of food-grade industrial vinegar
• York Capital in its leveraged buyout of Houlihan’s Restaurants, a Kansas-based restaurant company focused on polished casual dining and fine dining
• SmartStream Technologies, a portfolio company of the Investment Corporation of Dubai, in the formation of a reference data utility joint venture with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley
• SmartStream Technologies in its acquisition of algorithmics collateral assets from IBM

Oreste is a Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia University Law School, where he teaches a course focusing on mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and legal transactional strategies.