Ledgy the European Startup Equity Management Tool
Every startup company has the same problem: how do you manage your cap table and equity plans in transparent and simple way? In the US, you are likely to use an equity management system such as Carta. However, you don't have a ton of options if you are outside the US.
What Is Ledgy Doing
Ledgy would like to become the world's instrument for ownership management. Ledgy is already in use by well recognized European startups, such as Wefox, Kry, Bitpanda, Gorillas, and Trade Republic, with their headquarters in Switzerland.
The company has recently received $10 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and other investors.
A few years ago, Ledgy's co-founder and now CEO Yoko Spirig talked with a new startup funder who demonstrated how they manage ownership. He showed how they manage ownership. They used a simple Excel sheet with tons of data. Yoko realized how many errors you can get with unstructured Excel sheets.
Most organizations in Europe still use Excel spreadsheets to track ownership, with custom-built excel tools. Ledgy is on a mission to convince those companies that it would be helpful to move to a software solution designed to solve this exact problem.
Ledgy focuses on the software infrastructure and automation workflows that can be customized base on the target country. They are already supporting 32 countries. The product has been fine-tuned for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland even more precisely.
Soon, new country-specific releases for startups operating in the UK and France will be available. 1,500 businesses use Ledgy at the moment.
Why Customers Use Ledgy
There are three significant advantages when you move to Ledgy.
First, Ledgy serves as one source of truth for every single stakeholder, like other software-as-a-service products — the HR, financial team, investors, lawyers, and staff.
The second vital feature is that customers can automate some of the most challenging duties. Ledgy can generate papers automatically depending on templates and various factors, for instance. Ledgy also stores signed contracts. For compliance purposes, you can export data every quarter or annually.
Thirdly, it promotes company-wide transparency. The staff members can monitor ownership and even see the value of their shares or options. If the leadership team introduces new funding round, they can evaluate how much their options could be valued.
What Are the Plans for Ledgy
Ledgy hopes to expand to new markets with the current financing round. The company is also planning to support public corporations so that some of its existing customers can be made public and use Ledgy.