Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co

Partner

Puja Sondhi is a Partner with the General Corporate practice at the Firm with a focus on M&A/PE/VC.

Puja is a leading advisor with expertise in foreign investment and regulatory affairs, mergers & acquisitions (incl. public M&A), joint ventures, venture capital & private equity investments and corporate restructuring. Puja has successfully closed numerous complex, award-winning transactions requiring innovative structuring, regulatory expertise and solution-oriented approach across diverse sectors.

Puja has developed a strong “emerging companies” practice, focused on growth capital, spanning a broad range of new-age businesses including retail & e-commerce, digital media, online gaming, fintech, digital healthcare & online pharma. Puja has advised extensively on both founder/company mandates and investor mandates for fundraising, having acted for Grofers, NewsCorp, Inshorts, IndiaMart, Leap Technologies, Norwest Venture Partners, IFC, Raine group, Alpha Wave, QInvest, Elevation Capital and IDFC Alternatives, among others. Puja also regularly advises investors on portfolio company issues, particularly regulatory and corporate governance matters.

Puja is recognised as a thought leader in the Retail & E-commerce sector, having advised industry bodies, investors and investee companies on fundraising, business & corporate structuring, regulatory and policy issues. Her clients have included Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), Reliance Retail, Grofers, Walmart, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Firstcry, IndiaMart, Nike, Bose, Apollo Pharmacy and Sea group (Shopee).

She is an expert in joint ventures across their life cycle spanning formation, restructuring, shareholder disputes and exits across sectors, including joint ventures between Bharti group-Pizza Express, Biological E- GlaxoSmithKline, Visa Steel-Sun Coke and Axiall-DCM Shriram.

Puja was instrumental in starting and developing the Firm’s Japan practice and has advised major Japanese trading houses like Sumitomo and Itochu. She has previously served on the Globalisation Committee of ACMA (Automotive Component Manufacturers Association of India), and as an independent director in a publicly listed company.

Puja started her career as a corporate lawyer (capital markets and private equity) with the prestigious Wall Street law firm, Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP in New York. Previously, she was also the founding member and Chief Operating Officer of Teach For All (teachforall.org, a NY headquartered global not-for-profit launched by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair at the Clinton Global Initiative 2007), which is a global network working to advance educational equity across 50+ countries.

English, Hindi

New York State Bar Delhi High Court Bar Association

B.A. LL.B, (Honors), National Law School of India University Bangalore, India LL.M, Degree (Corporate Law), New York University School of Law, New York, US (Hauser Global Scholar)