Elizabeth Henderson

Partner, Co-Head of Venture Capital (Australia)

Sydney

Elizabeth co-heads the firm’s Venture Capital practice in Australia. She advises on transactions over the full life cycle of business creation and expansion, including early stage and expansion capital raising, acquisitions for growth, M&A and other liquidity transactions.

Elizabeth provides strategic advice and assistance to companies raising early stage or expansion capital and to investors in private capital raisings.

Elizabeth has extensive experience in public and private M&A, equity and debt capital raisings, joint ventures and trade sale & IPO exits across a wide range of industries, including financial services, technology, media and infrastructure.

She has also held senior commercial roles in the corporate and private sector and non-executive director roles.

In her legal career, Elizabeth has acted on numerous major public and private mergers & acquisition and corporate transactions including for Seven, Australian Capital Equity, Principal Financial Group, NAB, MLC, AXA and Lend Lease. She has also worked in investment teams for major infrastructure and energy transactions in the Asia Pacific including the sale of the Tamar Valley Power Station to the State of Tasmania.

In the private sector, Elizabeth held a number of senior management roles at Westpac. She was the Director of Strategic Sourcing responsible for commercial strategy, negotiations and relationship management for a more than $2 billion p/a contract portfolio comprising Westpac’s largest technology, telecommunications, outsourcing and offshoring relationships. She was also Director of the WorkSMART Program, one of Westpac’s largest ever organisational and cultural change programs, and Chief of Staff to the COO.

Elizabeth draws on this experience to lead strategy development and implementation in HSF’s Venture Capital practice nationally.

Elizabeth’s recent experience includes:

advising on early stage and expansion capital investments including in Kasada, Expert360, Beyond Ag, Dovetail, Fingerprint4Success, Roborigger, Reejig, Karst Stone Paper and for investment funds Grok and Skip.
acting for Atlassian in its acquisition of Code Barrel
acting for Adairs Limited in its NZ$80 million acquisition of Mocka Limited
acting for the founders and investors in the sale of 100% of Earnd to Greensill Capital

Background

Elizabeth holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Science (Physics major) both with First Class Honours from the University of Sydney and a Graduate Diploma of Applied Finance.

She is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Elizabeth is admitted to practise in New South Wales.