Most lawyers see one IPO in a career, if any. Markus Dreißigacker led the compliance workstream for a €15.6 billion one. Now he’s joining Compound as Of Counsel.

Two Decades In-House

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. Global Chief Compliance Officer, Data Protection Officer, and Director Legal Europe 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.

In every one of those roles he sat inside the business and answered for the outcome.

The €15.6 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 at that scale means rigorous legal work under brutal time pressure, the same combination our clients ask of us every day.

The M&A Track Record

More than 30 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 consumer contract law from Heidelberg, global compliance programs designed and rolled out from scratch, GDPR strategy deployed as a global DPO, and a Bruker legal team shortlisted for the Global Counsel Awards by ACC and Lexology. At the Lexology European Awards 2025, Markus himself took the individual win in the M&A In-House category.

Companies don’t have neatly separated legal problems. A financing round touches corporate law, IP, data protection, and compliance at once. Markus has handled all of them side by side for twenty years.

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. As Of Counsel at Compound, he takes on M&A, corporate, IP, compliance, and data protection mandates for our clients, with the judgement of someone who has closed deals, built teams, and answered to boards for twenty years.

AI accelerates. Humans validate. That’s Compound.