The company that fronts the cash so your startup stock options don't quietly expire.
Somewhere right now, an engineer is doing the math that ruins a good week. She left her startup on good terms. She has vested options - a real stake in something she helped build. And she has 90 days to exercise them or watch them vanish. The strike price is one number. The tax bill is a bigger, uglier number. Together they are more than she has in savings. The equity she "earned" is behaving like a bill she can't pay.
This is the moment Vested was built for. Not the founding montage, not the IPO confetti - this quiet, private arithmetic that plays out in tens of thousands of inboxes every year. Vested's answer is almost rude in its simplicity: it wires you the money to exercise, covers the taxes and fees, and takes a slice of the shares later, if and when there's a payday. No debt. No out-of-pocket cost. You keep the story; you just don't have to fund it alone.
The mechanics are cleverer than they look. Vested doesn't hand you a loan. It uses prepaid forward contracts - a structure that sidesteps the company's right-of-first-refusal dance and, crucially, doesn't trigger a 409A revaluation that would annoy your former employer. Underneath the friendly dashboard sits a C-corporation parent with investment fund vehicles, earning its keep from management fees and carry rather than interest. It is financial engineering pointed, for once, at the employee instead of away from them.
And it isn't only capital. Connect your Carta account or answer a few questions, and Vested hands you an equity dashboard, alerts when things move, and the Vestimate - its data-driven guess at what your illiquid private shares are actually worth today. For a category built on opacity, "here's a number, here's how it changed, here's how it compares" is close to heresy.
Link your equity grants through Carta, or answer a few questions about what you hold.
Vested returns a funding figure covering the strike price, estimated taxes and fees.
The team reviews and makes a funding decision - the pitch is simple, transparent and fast.
Approved money is wired out. You repay with a portion of shares only at a future liquidity event.
Cash to exercise vested options with zero out-of-pocket cost, repaid via a portion of shares at a liquidity event.
Monitor the value and growth of your holdings, with alerts when the numbers that matter start moving.
A data-driven estimate of what your startup equity is worth over time - benchmarked against similar companies.
Guided pathways to explore selling already-exercised options, RSUs, or other private equity you own.
A free library and calculators demystifying vesting, cliffs, ISOs vs NSOs, taxes and how to sell.
An SEC exempt-reporting adviser structure and clear terms, in a category better known for fine print.
Illustrative, not to scale. The point Vested makes: for many employees the exercise cost plus taxes exceeds available savings - so the equity expires. Vested closes the gap.
"We're not trying nearly as hard as a traditional VC to pick winners. We're more avoiding losers and replicating the asset class."
Thornton pairs a Georgetown Law degree with dual Penn degrees in Computer Science and Economics - a fitting résumé for a business that lives at the intersection of contracts, code and capital.
Closed seed funding, bringing total raised to roughly $4.77M to expand option-exercise funding and equity tools.
Dave Thornton joined The Meb Faber Show to argue that index-investing logic could come to venture capital - and to unlocking employee equity.
Vested reports $200M+ in options exercised across 40,000+ employees and 10,000+ companies, from its base in Miami.
The engineer opens her laptop again. Same options, same 90-day clock, same tax bill that used to end the conversation. This time the math has a different last line. She connects her grants, sees the Vestimate, gets a funding figure that covers the strike price and the taxes and the fees she'd forgotten about. She signs. The money moves. The equity she earned stays hers - no savings drained, no debt taken on, no shares surrendered until there's actually something to surrender.
That's the small, unglamorous thing Vested changed: it turned "I can't afford my own equity" into a solvable problem. Not a manifesto - just a wire transfer arriving at the right moment. In a market that spent years treating employee ownership as a fine-print formality, showing up with cash and a straight answer turns out to be the radical part.
Figures (funding, employees served, options exercised) are company-reported or drawn from public sources and are approximate. Profile compiled from publicly available information.