Most teams discover that equity management is a job, not a document, about two years in — when the vesting of an employee who left has to be calculated retroactively, when a SAFE from the pre-seed converts differently than everyone remembered, or when an exit offer arrives and nobody can say who gets paid what. Managing equity means keeping the whole lifecycle coherent, from the first founder split to the last euro distributed.
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"Cap table" is the record; equity management is everything that writes to it. Each stage has its own decisions, its own paperwork and its own way of going wrong, and they compound: a vesting start date nobody recorded in year one becomes a dispute in year four. Aportia covers the stages in a single project rather than across four tools and a shared drive.
| Stage | What you manage |
|---|---|
| Allocate | Founder splits, share classes, reserved pool |
| Grant | Options (ESOP) and phantom shares out of the pool |
| Vest | Schedules, cliffs, good and bad leavers |
| Dilute | SAFEs, convertible notes, priced rounds |
| Document | Certificates, resolutions, signatures, audit log |
| Exit | Waterfall, preferences, who actually gets paid |
A grant is a promise with a calendar attached, and the calendar is where it breaks. Cliffs pass unnoticed, a leaver's unvested portion goes back to the pool or doesn't, and a pool that looked generous turns out to be half committed. Tracking grants against the reserved pool means the answer to "how much do we have left to offer" is a number you can read rather than one you recompute each time.
Dilution isn't one event, it's an accumulation: a pre-seed SAFE, a convertible note with a different cap, a pool top-up the investor asked for, then the priced round itself. Each is reasonable alone and together they surprise people. The useful thing is not knowing the definition of dilution but seeing, before signing, what your own percentage becomes when all of them land at once.
Where the surprise usually comes from
Founders tend to model the round and forget the instruments already outstanding. A SAFE with a low valuation cap converts at a better price than the new money — so it takes a bigger bite than its nominal amount suggests, and it does so before the round's own dilution is applied.
Equity decisions only exist if they're documented. A grant without a signed document, a transfer without a resolution, a vesting start date that lives in someone's memory — these are the items that stall a due diligence and occasionally end up in a dispute. Aportia generates the documents from the cap table itself, collects signatures and keeps an audit log of every change, so the record and the paperwork say the same thing.
The percentage on the cap table is not what people receive. Liquidation preferences pay first, phantom shares are a liability settled in cash, and unvested grants may never participate at all. An exit waterfall applies that order to a real offer and shows the amount per holder — which is usually the first time everyone sees the difference between what they own and what they collect.
The lifecycle above is the same for any company, and it's what Aportia is built around. On top of it there's an option most equity tools don't offer: running the pre-funding stage dynamically, with ownership following logged contributions, and freezing it into fixed shares when you raise. Useful while a team is bootstrapping and contributions are uneven — and entirely skippable if they aren't.
It's the tooling for everything that changes ownership over a company's life: allocating it, granting options, tracking vesting, modelling dilution, producing the documents and calculating what each holder receives at an exit. The cap table is the output; equity management is the set of processes that keep it true.
They overlap, and in Aportia they're the same product seen from two angles. A cap table answers "who owns what right now". Equity management is the wider job around it — grants, vesting calendars, convertible instruments, signed paperwork and exit waterfalls. If you only need the register, start from the cap table; if you're running the whole lifecycle, start here.
Yes, both, and from the same reserved pool. Options (ESOP) grant an actual right to shares; phantom shares are a contractual cash right that never touches the cap table but does show up as a liability at exit. Aportia tracks each with its own vesting and includes both in the exit calculation.
$19.99 per month or $199.99 per year, per project, with unlimited members — the price doesn't change as the team grows. The trial lasts 7 days and doesn't ask for a card.
Aportia covers allocation, grants, vesting, dilution, documents and exit waterfalls in a single project — flat $19.99/mo with unlimited members.
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