Managing cap tables and equity at high-growth companies can be a complicated (and sometimes messy) business, a fact that founders and employees often discover too late. That’s given rise to a wave of companies building software to help, and today a European leader in that pack is announcing some funding to fuel its own growth. Ledgy, a startup out of Zurich that builds cap table management software specifically for companies and their employees working across multiple countries, has raised $22 million, a Series B that it is using for hiring, further product developments, and to bring on more users.
Ledgy’s platform today covers tools for finance, HR, legal and VC teams as well as employees themselves, and is used both to provide a snapshot of the state of a company’s equity at a given moment, and to help employees and companies manage what they may choose to do with that over time. The company today has some 2,500 companies as customers, up from 1,500 a year ago, and revenues have tripled, CEO and co-founder Yoko Spirig said in an interview.
Significantly, its rise dovetails with an interesting moment for European tech. We are starting to see a lot more European startups opting to remain in Europe to raise funding and scale rather than transplant to the U.S. as they would have been expected to do in the past, and with that the issue of equity awards for those companies’ employees is only growing. Ledgy counts some of the bigger startups in the European ecosystem among its customers, including Peak, Getir, Kry, Monese, Selina Finance, Gorillas, Choco, Alan, Pennylane and Scalapay.
Ledgy itself has some impressive names on its own cap table. This round is being led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with Sequoia Capital, Speedinvest, btov, Visionaries Club, and unnamed angels also participating. Sequoia (as part of its much bigger move into Europe) led Ledgy’s Series A of $10 million a year ago, and with this latest round NEA partner Jonathan Golden is joining Sequioa’s Luciana Lixandru on the board. It has now raised $33.5 million to date.
Ledgy’s sweet spot is working with companies that have employees situated in different jurisdictions, and building a product for them that acts both both as a finance and HR tool.
While a number of companies like Carta, and more recently AngelList and Pulley (respectively valued at $6.8 billion, $4 billion, and up to $300 million for the younger Pulley) continue to make waves in the U.S. market, Ledgy has spotted an opportunity to build for scenarios where companies want to provide international employees with equity and need to balance the differences in regulations and culture when doing so.
“We started in fragmented Europe, which was a curse and blessing,” Spirig said. “It forced us to serve customers with international teams.”
Ledgy stumbled on this almost by accident, Spirig said.
She and her co-founders (CTO Timo Horstschaefer and CPO Ben Brandt) were working on a different startup in Zurich, in the area …read more