Entrepreneurs Pol Gomà and Marc Jordana launched Capboard in March of this year, a platform for startups to easily manage the various financial instruments they use for their creation and subsequent growth.
That is, to have exhaustive control over asset value, shareholder stakes of partners—cap tables—, investor profiles, simulate possible financing rounds, convertible notes, or secondary operations.
In addition to keeping up-to-date the incentive plans established to retain employees, which usually focus on the allocation of phantom shares, the so-called phantom shares that are assigned to employees and for which they receive a share of the company's profits. One of the current problems with these plans is that employees with phantoms cannot transparently see the real value of what they own.
Once its application is consolidated and after having digitized and automated the management of cap tables or shareholder ledgers and incentive plans for more than 450 emerging companies in Spain, Capboard has just closed a financing round of 285,000 euros to face growth. The objective is twofold: to cover the European and Latin American markets and to develop new business lines to improve the relationship between startups and their investors, while also entering the SME segment.
In their case, with this operation to raise resources, Bewa7er Market, parent company of Indexa Capital, and prominent business angels such as Andrés Bou, founder of Social Point; Javier Fondevila and Bernat Ripoll, founders of Holded; Iñaki Ecenarro, founder of Trovit; Carlos Blanco, founder of Nuclio and Encomienda; and Albert Armengol, founder of Doctoralia, have entered Capboard's capital.
Capboard, developed a few months ago, provides services to more than 450 companies in SpainPol Gomà and Marc Jordana detected this market niche after working for several startups ---such as Uber, GoTrendier, and Rakuten---and to see that there was a lot of ignorance about the functioning of some of the financing instruments or the formulas chosen to incentivize employees, a circumstance that did not occur in the United States, where online applications of this type existed.
These young entrepreneurs realized that "Europe is light-years away from the United States in the digitalization of equity", as they state in their own application, and propose that Capboard become the "standard online platform for managing shares and incentive plans" in Europe and Latin America.
The creators of the application want to turn it into a standard tool in Europe and Latin AmericaIn addition, the platform they have designed facilitates the management of lawyers, according to its creators, with automatic calculations and a document repository to reduce friction with their clients; at the same time, all company partners have visibility over their shares.
To opt for Capboard's services, companies must adjust to monthly or annual fees depending on their stage of development and the number of employees and investors they have.