A Company’s capitalization table (“Cap Table”) is complete list of all of a Company’s securities and who owns them.
The Cap Table is a historical record of who owns how many shares of the Company’s stock, stock options, warrants, convertibles and other ownership stakes in the Company. As the Company grows and raises capital from investors and issues equity incentives to employees and contractors, the Cap Table gets more complicated. It is important to keep track of all of this information and ensure it is accurate and up-to-date.
The Cap Table platforms in the marketplace (Carta, Shareworks, etc.) have developed solutions to help companies, investors and their counsel keep track of this data at reasonable cost to ensure its accuracy, completeness and that it is current and readily accessible. It is very difficult and expensive to achieve this without one of these platforms, which is why so many companies use them at the outset.