startup-equity
(7)
Oren Barzilai Is Turning Startup Equity’s Fine Print Into an Exit Door
A teenage coder became a three-time founder, then built Equitybee around a costly contradiction: startup employees can earn stock options for years and still leave with none of the shares.
EquityZen Built a Waiting Room for the IPO - Then Morgan Stanley Bought the Door
For 13 years, EquityZen has turned startup stock - awkward, restricted and stubbornly illiquid - into something more people can transact. Its new owner, Morgan Stanley, is betting that the private market needs plumbing as much as it needs picks.
Qapita
Qapita is a Singapore-headquartered equity management platform that helps private and public companies, startups and investment funds run their cap tables, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), valuations, fundraising, liquidity events and fund administration in one system. Founded in 2019 by a banker-investor-technologist trio, it serves over 2,400 private companies and 100+ listed companies across India, Southeast Asia and now the US, managing more than $55B in equity for over 500,000 stakeholders.
Harness (Harness Wealth)
Harness (Harness Wealth) is a New York fintech that pairs software with a curated marketplace of vetted tax, financial and estate advisors, aimed at people with complex finances - startup founders, equity-holding employees, business owners, crypto investors and other 'builders.' It combines a vertical SaaS platform that powers collaboration between tax advisors and their clients, a marketplace to discover specialist firms, and consumer tools for tracking equity and net worth. Founded in 2018 by David Snider, the former CFO/COO of Compass, the company has raised roughly $40M and grew revenue by more than 1,500% between 2021 and 2024.
David Snider
David Snider is the founder and CEO of Harness, a New York wealthtech company that pairs people navigating startup equity, taxes, and estate decisions with a curated network of tax, financial, and legal advisers. Before Harness, he was COO and CFO of Compass, where he helped scale the real estate platform from pre-launch to a $1.8 billion valuation and raised every round from Series A through E. Earlier he invested more than $2 billion in deals at Bain Capital private equity and, as a college senior, wrote Money Makers, a finance primer built from interviews with leaders like Jamie Dimon and David Rubenstein.
Equitybee
Equitybee is a financial technology marketplace that connects startup employees who can't afford to exercise their vested stock options with accredited investors willing to fund the exercise in exchange for a share of the future upside. Founded in 2017 by three childhood friends and headquartered in Palo Alto, the platform lets employees convert paper equity into real ownership - or cash - without waiting for an IPO, while giving investors a rare way to buy into pre-IPO companies they otherwise couldn't reach.
Carta
Carta is a San Francisco fintech that turned the messy spreadsheet of startup ownership into software. Founded in 2012 as eShares, it manages cap tables, 409A valuations, equity plans, and fund administration for tens of thousands of companies and venture funds - now positioning itself as the connective tissue for the entire private capital market.