The phrase “Startup as a Service” has crept up here and there across the interwebs over the last decade. In modern entrepreneurship, founders can buy into resources and accelerated growth via corporate-sponsored hackathons, incubators, and startup studios.
The last on that list has given Startup as a Service the most meaning to date. Startup studios like Betaworks can support founders with anything from validating ideas and building a go-to-market strategy to fundraising preparation.
What about the part that comes next — incorporation, banking, equity management, and the actual fundraising?
Yesterday, AngelList launched a new product for that, and it had startuppy folks buzzing. AngelList Stack, as the name suggests, is really like multiple products in one but built to work seamlessly.
To start, founders use a "friendly UI" with best practices baked-in to incorporate their company. That process traditionally takes weeks of work, and can now be done much simpler according to Sumukh Sridhara, AngelList Head of Product & Engineering. From there, founders get equipped with a bank account and are ready to fundraise with a single link. The company can issue SAFEs (the agreement that gives investors future equity) and create Roll Up Vehicles.
AngelList Stack also automatically sets up an automated cap table — the document that shows who owns what equity in a company — that updates as you grow. The suite also helps to manage equity grants for employees and investor certificates and communications.
If you’re in the startup space, you might already be using individual Carta products for some of these services. Carta originally launched to the startup world with its digital stock certificates, then called eShares, in 2012. It scaled to cap table management and started rolling out features like SAFEs to support easier fundraising. The company has continuually stretched the Startup as a Service space and just last month launched Carta Launch, a fundraising and equity management platform.
While Carta’s been targeting founders from the start, AngelList started its story with a community for investors to connect with and invest in startups. Techie pundits indicate this as a pivot for AngelList to the founder-side of the moon.
Many of you know that AngelList is a sister company to Product Hunt. Working towards our own mission to empower makers, we're thrilled to welcome friendly competition that benefits makers.
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