Aarthi Belani focuses on M&A and venture deals in tech and life sciences. She also counsels emerging growth technology companies, corporate venture investors, social enterprises, and impact investors.

She is a Leadership Committee member for How Women Lead, which is part of the 2020 Women on Boards national campaign, and a director of Bidoun, a not-for-profit publishing, curatorial, and educational initiative that prints a quarterly magazine showcasing art and culture from the Middle East.

Prior experience: After finishing an academic fellowship at NYU School of Law's Institute for International Law and Justice, Aarthi joined the international law firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, where she worked on complex cross-border M&A and innovative development finance. She then went in-house at Credit Suisse, in strategy M&A and corporate development. Aarthi also managed certain bank-wide compliance issues for CS related to integrating acquisitions and joint ventures, and was a member of the Sustainability Network, a cross-divisional initiative to develop impact investment products. She came to the Bay Area in late 2013 to join the M&A practice at Jones Day in Palo Alto, then moved to Baker McKenzie in Palo Alto in 2021.

Aarthi holds a J.D. and LLM from NYU School of Law, and a B.A. from Stanford University.