Gunderson Dettmer Represents Astral in Acquisition by OpenAI

Gunderson Dettmer represented Astral in its acquisition by OpenAI.

Astral is aiming to make programming more productive by building fast, robust tools that radically change what it feels like to work with Python. Astral’s acquisition will bring its tooling and engineering expertise to OpenAI, accelerate work on OpenAI’s Codex ecosystem, and expand what AI can do across the software development lifecycle.

“Today, AI is rapidly changing the way we build software, and the pace of that change is only accelerating,” said Astral founder Charlie Marsh, in the announcement of the transaction. “If our goal is to make programming more productive, then building at the frontier of AI and software feels like the highest-leverage thing we can do. It is increasingly clear to me that Codex is that frontier. And by bringing Astral's tooling and expertise to OpenAI, we're putting ourselves in a position to push it forward.”

The Gunderson deal team was led by corporate partner Trevor Knapp and included corporate of counsel Andrew Person and associates Joe McGinley, Ben Lezin, and Sierra Singer, M&A partner Andrew Luh and associate Jacob Levy, executive compensation partner Michael Richman and associates Sofia Siegel and Elisabeth Bernabe, data privacy partner Anna Westfelt and associate Frida Alim, regulatory partner Gregory Kinzelman, strategic transactions and licensing partner Katie Gardner and associates Christina Chen, Srinithi Narayanan, and Ambreena Ladhani, and tax partner Mark Foster and associate Morgan Otway.