From €17 Billion IPO to Compound Law. Dr. Markus Dreißigacker Joins.

Most lawyers see one IPO in a career, if any. Markus Dreißigacker led the compliance workstream for a €17.3 billion one. Now he’s joining Compound.

Two Decades on the Inside

Markus has spent over twenty years as the lawyer global companies put in the room when the stakes are highest. General Counsel Northern Europe at Kellogg’s. General Counsel DACH for Pringles. Chief Compliance Officer, Data Protection Officer, and General Counsel at JDE Peet’s. Today he serves as Group General Counsel and Compliance Officer at Bruker Corporation, sitting on the Group Management Board with responsibility for Legal, Compliance, IP, and ESG.

That’s not a career of advising from the sidelines. That’s a career of owning the outcome.

The €17.3 Billion IPO

In 2020, JDE Peet’s pulled off one of the largest European IPOs in a decade, and did it fully remote, in the middle of a pandemic. Markus led the entire compliance workstream, up to the presentation to global underwriters, and delivered the post-IPO roadmap after the listing.

Fast-track IPO readiness for a company of that scale is a masterclass in doing rigorous legal work at speed. Sound familiar? It’s exactly what our clients demand every day.

M&A Lawyer of the Year

Markus was named M&A Lawyer of the Year 2025. Behind the title: more than 40 post-merger integration projects and over 50 startup, seed, and VC projects, from founding stage to family-owned businesses to listed companies. Add a Ph.D. in comparative consumer law from Heidelberg, global compliance programs designed and rolled out from scratch, and GDPR strategy deployed as a global DPO.

The range matters. Companies don’t have neatly separated legal problems. A financing round touches corporate law, IP, data protection, and compliance at once. Markus has run that whole board for decades.

Why Compound

Markus is passionate about AI and legal tech, and he has seen from the inside how much legal work at global companies is still manual, slow, and fragmented. At Compound, he takes on M&A, corporate, IP, compliance, and data protection work for our clients. AI handles the speed. Markus brings the judgement of someone who has closed deals, built teams, and answered to boards for twenty years.

AI accelerates. Humans validate. That’s Compound.