Managing your cap table today
Pulley had more than 8,000 customers, but it wasn't enough for a venture scale business.
September 27, 2026 (first posted September 17, 2026)
Pulley announced last week that it is shutting down.
The company built cap table and equity management software, competing most directly with Carta. It raised around $50 million, including a $40 million Series B led by Founders Fund in 2022. By the end of 2024, Forbes reported that Pulley had 7,700 customers, and more recently Pulley advertised that it was trusted by more than 8,000 companies, all of whom got a notice that Pulley will shut down on December 8th.
Pulley hasn't said why, but they faced structural pressure to build a venture scale business:
Pulley faced pressure from both ends of the market. Below it sat small businesses spinning up on Stripe Atlas, where cap table management wasn't yet a priority. Above it sat companies approaching IPO, which migrated to premium platforms like Shareworks or Morgan Stanley's investment-grade tools. That middle tier—growing venture-backed companies committed to Carta's workflow—was too narrow to sustain the business.
At Stripe Sessions in 2024, founder and CEO Yin Wu said that looking back at raising $40 million, she would operate "quite different" if she did it again. The pressure from her investors was "You need to go higher, higher, higher. You need to spend, spend, spend," and she wasn't sure the growth was real:
I wasn't clear whether any of this growth was really sustainable. Sure, you could go and spend a lot to acquire each customer but if the cost of acquiring this customer was so much higher than what the payback of the customer was, what happens actually on the other side?
With that in mind, a number of cap table management companies have been acquired or shut down over the past few years.
LTSE Equity, originally Captable.io, exited the cap table business in 2024. AngelList built its own standalone cap-table product, but in 2025 stopped offering it for new customers outside of their own investment vehicles. Prior to that, Fidelity acquired Shoobx and turned it into Fidelity Private Shares, J.P. Morgan acquired Global Shares, Morgan Stanley acquired Solium, which became Shareworks. Carta acquired Capdesk to add to it's cap table solutions.
Where do Pulley's customers go? In addition to Carta, Pulley's recommended migration partner, a number of companies are pitching to migrate Pulley's customers:
Carta may have originated in cap table management, but it grew into a much wider and larger business years ago. Companies that remain focused on cap tables will have to build more durable businesses, and their customers should plan for the possibility that they won't.
Whichever platform you choose, keep current exports of your cap table, transaction history, documents, and stakeholder details. Switching systems is inconvenient; reconstructing your company's ownership records is much worse.
Hemrock's web cap table and cap table spreadsheet are valuable for modeling rounds and changes in ownership even in complicated situations, but I don't recommend either as the system of record for a growing company. Use dedicated cap table software and keep a copy of your data.