Mantle rolls out free cap table management tool for early-stage startups

Toronto-based Carta competitor Mantle, which caters to technology companies, law firms, and limited partners (LPs), has launched a free version of its equity management platform for early-stage founders.

With Mantle Starter, the software startup claims to provide entrepreneurs with “professional-grade equity tools at no cost” to help them stay organized, investor-ready, and compliant as they raise early funding and build their teams.

“If you’re hiring your first employees or raising initial capital, you should have a cap table tool to meet you where you’re at.”
Amar Varma, Mantle

Mantle Starter’s features include artificial intelligence (AI)-powered document processing (for simple agreements for future equity, option grants, and share issuances) that the company claims can automatically build structured, audit-ready capitalization tables, which are detailed breakdowns of the company’s ownership structure across types of shares and convertible debts. It also offers the ability to add unlimited stakeholders and export in the Open Cap Table Format with a single click.

“If you’re hiring your first employees or raising initial capital, you should have a cap table tool to meet you where you’re at,” Mantle co-founder and CEO Amar Varma said in a statement.

With Mantle Starter, Mantle co-founder and head of operations Amit Jethani told BetaKit that the company hopes to scale alongside its clients, demonstrating its value to startups early for free and eventually converting them to paying customers.

“Offering a free cap table platform gives startups a clean foundation and gives us the opportunity to grow with them,” Jethani told BetaKit. “As companies mature, they often need more advanced tools like in-platform exercising, board approvals, and 409A valuations. That’s where our paid plan comes in: it supports more complex workflows while keeping everything centralized and easy to manage.”

Formerly known as Ten Key Labs, Mantle aims to help entrepreneurs simplify and automate cap table management, equity issuing, fundraising options, planning, forecasting, and signing and secure document storage solutions called data rooms. The startup plays in the competitive equity management software market, which features incumbents like Morgan Stanley’s Shareworks, Carta, and AngelList.

Jethani views Mantle’s use of AI to automate the extraction of data from uploaded legal documents—a process he says otherwise “can typically take hours of manual data entry and back-and-forth with legal counsel” as a differentiator. He also singled out the access Mantle offers to unlimited stakeholders across its free and paid plans as “a major shift from traditional models, where costs can balloon as your cap table grows.”

Mantle was founded in 2022 by Varma, a serial tech entrepreneur and investor, Jethani, and a group of former co-workers from Toronto software development firm XtremeLabs and Silicon Valley-based connected vehicle platform Autonomic.

The company raised $10.5 million USD in seed funding in 2023 from a group that includes Eniac Ventures, Craft Ventures, Vaynerfund, Sierra Ventures, Leaders Fund, former Shopify CFO Russ Jones, Shopify head of engineering and ex-Xtreme Labs VP of engineering Farhan Thawar, Wave co-founder Kirk Simpson, and Varma’s fellow former Extreme Venture Partners founding partner Sandeep Madra.

Through Mantle Equity, Mantle helps both startup founders and the law firms they work with automate their cap table management. Since its seed round, Jethani said Mantle has expanded into the United States and doubled the size of its team. Late last year, Mantle launched its second core product, Mantle Portal, to help LPs such as endowments, family offices, and funds-of-funds collect, manage, and analyze documents and data.

Teams can move to paid plans for access to more advanced features, including support for more complex securities like preferred shares, warrants, and restricted stock awards.

Feature image courtesy Scott Graham via Unsplash.