The Weekly Docket
By Louis Lehot, Partner, Foley & Lardner LLP. Garage to global, since Y2K.
Friends,
Big week for clients. Two pieces from my desk. Cerebras finally printed. Here is the docket.
Last Week (May 11 to 15)
Foley represented Mirantis in its $625M all-stock sale to IREN. Congratulations to the Mirantis team. Kubernetes infrastructure, the k0rdent AI platform, and the NVIDIA AI Cloud Ready ISV relationship all going to IREN. Mirantis continues as a standalone subsidiary. AI-cloud consolidation is the M&A theme of the quarter. Kubernetes operators and MLOps platforms should be paying attention.
Foley served as IP counsel to Carna Health in its partnership with Renalytix PLC (LSE: RENX). Congratulations to the Carna team. AI-enabled chronic kidney disease prevention, partnered with a publicly traded UK diagnostic. The structural lesson for cross-border life sciences in 2026: keep the IP licensing layer separate from the commercial JV layer. Different counterparties, different exit triggers, different audit treatment.
Foley represented Samsung Ventures in XBOW’s $35M Series C. Congratulations to Oege de Moor and the XBOW team. Autonomous offensive security, with Samsung Ventures joining Accenture Ventures, DNX Ventures, Liberty Global Tech Ventures, NVentures, and SentinelOne S Ventures. When five strategics show up on a Series C cap table, you are not buying the equity, you are buying the integration roadmap.
Foley represented OpenLight Photonics in its $50M Series A-1 (oversubscribed). Congratulations to Adam Carter and the OpenLight team. Photonic ASICs for AI infrastructure. Led by Matter Venture Partners (welcome, Wen Hsieh), with Acclimate and Catapult new to the cap table, and Xora, Capricorn, Mayfield, and New Legacy back in.
Cerebras priced its IPO at $185 Wednesday and opened Thursday at $350. Closed the first day at $311.07, up 68%. Thirty million shares, $5.55B raised, the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber in 2019. The S-1/A drafting on customer concentration, CFIUS clearance, and forward-contract liability is going to be the template for every AI-infrastructure issuer in the pipeline. Read the prospectus.
Anthropic is reportedly in talks for another $30B+ raise at $900B+ valuation. Bloomberg broke it Monday, Financial Times put the number as high as $50B, October IPO target. If this prices, the valuation conversation moves to a trillion.
The CFO Playbook for Value Creation in a Volatile Market. Thursday, May 14, Open Future Forum. A closed-door executive session with a sharp room of PE-backed CFOs and senior advisors. EBITDA growth, operational alignment, AI strategy, exit readiness, capital efficiency. I wrote up the takeaways on Medium: When the Ground Moves Beneath Your Feet: Notes from a PE-Backed CFO Forum. Thanks to everyone who joined.
GC Lunch: Securing AI Agents in the Enterprise. Friday, May 15, Foley Palo Alto. Kelly Boyd moderated, with Peter Stockburger and RingCentral’s Michael Michado. Access management for agentic systems, agency liability when the human-in-the-loop disappears, and the governance frameworks that have to catch up with autonomy. Off-the-record, senior in-house counsel only. The takeaway every GC in the room wrote down: your AI policy is not a policy until it answers “who is the principal when the agent acts.”
From My Desk
Two pieces I put out this week.
What We Took Home From Milken Week with Brian Wheeler and Gus Resendiz. Three of us spent the week in Beverly Hills. The useful conversations happened in the side rooms and at our TIDE party on Tuesday night. A few things we are bringing back to clients:
Jensen Huang framed AI as a five-layer cake, not a model. AI is infrastructure, not software. Diligence exposure at every layer of the stack.
Larry Fink on retirement capital. Over half of BlackRock’s $14T is retirement money. The DOL’s March 30 proposed rule on private-credit access for defined-contribution plans is the next battleground. Fund managers raising vehicles built for that channel should be in front of ERISA counsel now.
Bruce Flatt on private credit. 50% of Brookfield’s $1.2T private credit book sits in asset types that were not investable 15 years ago. He expects 75% in another ten. The covenant packages we are reviewing right now already reflect that shift.
Ken Griffin on Miami. Citadel is expanding its Florida footprint. New York lost it, Miami did not win it. Tax policy is a signal, and capital reads signals faster than politicians do.
From Punchline to Platform: Hard Things Round Two and the Real History of Robotics with Vitaly Golomb of Mavka Capital. Round Two of our invite-only Physical AI series in San Francisco gave us Andra Keay of Silicon Valley Robotics, who has been running the world’s largest robotics cluster since 2011, when there were thirty companies and no venture industry for robotics. The fundamentals have not changed. The capital has finally caught up. If you advise or underwrite in robotics or embodied AI, read this one before your next term sheet.
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Recent Reading
Three earlier pieces still on the desk of every client who asks me what’s next:
The De-SPAC Transaction: What Went Wrong and What Public Company GCs Should Still Know. For GCs of de-SPAC’d companies, the litigation is current, not historical. Audit governance, reassess legacy disclosures, manage risk.
Q1 2026: A Record Quarter, a Compressed Market, and a Window That Won’t Stay Open. AI captured most of Q1 VC dollars. Secondaries are the primary liquidity path. Speed, preparation, decisive execution.
Pre-IPO Planning Is No Longer About Going Public. It’s About Keeping Every Option Alive. Pre-IPO readiness is a value-maximizing discipline, not a transaction-specific choice.
On the Calendar
Hard Things Round Three. Thursday, May 28, San Francisco. Our next invite-only Physical AI evening with Vitaly Golomb and Mavka Capital. Reply if you want an invite.
Secondaries Forum. Tuesday, June 9. Tender offers, GP-led secondaries, continuation vehicles, structured liquidity. The practitioners actually closing the deals. Reply for details.
Closing Argument
Pre-IPO issuers: Cerebras priced clean. Get your S-1 readiness memo, your 10b5-1 program, and your independent-director slate on the table this week.
GCs of enterprises adopting agentic AI: your AI policy is not a policy until it answers “who is the principal when the agent acts.”
Strategic acquirers in life sciences: Carna and Renalytix is a template. Separate the IP licensing layer from the commercial JV layer.
Series C and D issuers: when five strategics show up on your cap table, the integration roadmap is the deal.
Fund managers: the DOL’s March 30 private-credit rule is the next regulatory window. Get ERISA counsel engaged.
Standard disclosures: opinions my own, not my firm's. Not legal advice. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.