A cap table only earns its keep on the day someone asks to see it — a term sheet lands, an investor opens due diligence, a cofounder leaves. On that day a spreadsheet is a liability: nobody remembers which version is current, the vesting column was last updated by hand in March, and the convertible everyone forgot about is nowhere in the file. Cap table software exists to make that day boring.
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A list of names and percentages is not a cap table — it's a screenshot of one moment. What a founding team actually needs is the ability to answer "who owned what, on this date, and why" without reconstructing it. That means the tool has to hold the history, not just the present state.
Companies don't move in percentages, they move in events: a new partner comes in, someone sells to someone else, the notary registers a capital increase, a note converts. A spreadsheet forces you to translate each of those into a number by hand and hope you did it right. In Aportia each one is a dated transaction that recalculates the table and leaves a trace behind it.
| Event | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Issue shares | New shares to new or existing holders |
| Transfer | Ownership moves between two holders |
| Capital increase / reduction | Share count and share capital |
| Bonus issue | New shares out of reserves, no new cash in |
| Convertible → equity | SAFEs and notes become shares |
| Grant from the pool | Options or phantom shares assigned |
Each one is stored as a dated transaction, so the table can be rebuilt at any point in its history.
As soon as there's an investor, "one share = one share" stops being true. Preferred shares carry liquidation preference and voting rights that ordinary shares don't, and the option pool has to be reserved before the round rather than discovered after it. Aportia models classes explicitly and keeps the reserved pool as a visible line on the table, so the fully-diluted number you quote is the real one.
The number investors will check
Fully diluted ownership includes the unissued option pool. A cap table that only counts issued shares will show every founder a percentage that's higher than what they actually hold — and that gap surfaces in due diligence, at the worst possible moment.
Dilution is easy to agree to in the abstract and painful to discover afterwards. Before committing to a term sheet you want to see, per holder, what the post-money table looks like — including how the SAFEs from eighteen months ago convert and how much of the pool the investor expects you to top up. Aportia runs that simulation against your real table rather than a blank template.
Everything above is a conventional cap table, and for most companies that's the whole job. Aportia adds one option the others don't have: during the pre-funding stage you can run all or part of the table dynamically, so ownership follows logged contributions instead of a percentage agreed on day one — and freeze it into fixed shares when the round arrives. It's a mode you turn on, not a way of working the tool imposes.
Optional, not the default
A project can be entirely fixed, entirely dynamic, or a mix — some members on a guaranteed percentage and others accruing from contributions. You decide per project, and you can freeze the dynamic part into fixed shares in one step.
It's a tool that records who owns what in a company and keeps that record correct as shares are issued, transferred, granted and diluted. The difference from a spreadsheet is history and arithmetic: it stores every transaction that changed ownership and recalculates the table itself, so the numbers can be audited rather than trusted.
Not legally, but it's much cheaper to start clean than to reconstruct. Most of the pain in a first due diligence comes from the eighteen months before it — undated grants, a vesting start nobody wrote down, a convertible that lived in an email thread. Those are the things a cap table tool makes you record at the time.
$19.99 per month or $199.99 per year, per project, with unlimited members — adding people to the cap table doesn't change the bill. There's a 7-day free trial and it doesn't ask for a card.
Yes. In Aportia some members can hold a fixed percentage while others accrue their share from logged contributions, with a reserved pool alongside both. When you raise, the dynamic part is frozen into fixed shares and the table carries on as a conventional one.
Aportia keeps ownership, share classes, vesting, convertibles and every transaction in one place — flat $19.99/mo, unlimited members, 7-day trial without a card.
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