The Company:
Carta is a software platform that helps startup founders, employees, and investors manage their equity and capitalization tables. It offers software and services that enable companies to manage all things equity in one place, including cap tables, valuations, fundraising, issuing shares, expensive accounting, and equity planning.
Carta is committed to simplifying equity management for LLCs. The flexible platform supports even the most complex equity structures, making it possible for LLCs big and small to manage ownership, valuations, and distributions in one place.
The Problem:
Carta’s LLC product enables companies to issue interests to their employees. As with any financial service, there are many forms that need to be sent to interest holders, such as award acceptance agreements. Due to the particular nature of LLC businesses, these agreements are all highly custom and differ greatly from customer to customer.
Carta wanted to help LLCs manage acceptance agreements within its platform, not just standardized government forms. To do so, the product team needed an easy way for cap table admins to templatize their LLCs’ documents on their own and map them to company and shareholder data within Carta. Once configured, templates need to be programmatically populated, shared, signed and stored.
Most important of all, Carta needed this entire process to be intuitive and seamless for their users.
The Solution:
Carta embedded Anvil’s no-code template builder, providing its users with a simple drag and drop interface to create fillable templates from their own PDFs. Once fields are automatically identified as fillable fields by Anvil or drawn, users make a selection from a drop down menu to assign the correct field type and data mapping (using Anvil’s field alias feature). Now any document template is ready to be filled with company or shareholder information.
Once a template is created, captable administrators can generate and share documents in bulk from a csv-like interface in the app. The completed documents are presented to interest holders in their own Carta accounts, where they are also available to sign as needed. The fully executed agreements are then saved and stored in Carta and the LLC’s cap table is updated.
You can read about generating LLC agreements in Carta and watch a product demo of the document generation and signing here.
The Result:
By leveraging Anvil ’s embedded template builder and APIs, Carta was able to quickly launch a simple in-product experience for LLCs to generate fully executed legal agreements and other documents when issuing interests. This is a major value add for Carta’s LLC customers and an important roadmap milestone for the Carta product team. By using the Anvil Platform building blocks for their PDF templatizing, generation and e-signing, the Carta team was able to focus their development efforts on composing those elements into a seamless workflow for their users.
As a result, the Carta team was able to launch a critical feature on time and with fewer engineering hours than they would have needed if they instead built the components themselves or stitched together multiple vendor solutions. Within a month of launching, Carta users were creating hundreds of templates to be filled and signed by shareholders from the same place they manage their equity.