Ledgy banks $22 million in Series B round

Led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Ledgy’s series B round also attracted Speedinvest, who joins existing investors, including Sequoia Capital (lead investor in series A round), 20VC, btov and VI Partners. The investors support the startup’s mission to strengthen the culture of employee share ownership across Europe.

"The participation of top tier VCs in our Series B is significant for two reasons. First, it’s a powerful validation of Ledgy and our strong growth in the 12 months since our Series A. Second, it reflects a significant trend in which leading US investors are increasing their exposure to the European continent by partnering with the best companies in what is a fast-growing and vibrant startup ecosystem,” says Yoko Spring, CEO of Ledgy.

Founded in 2017 by Yoko Spirig Ben Brandt (Chief Product Officer), and Timo Horstschäfer (CTO), Ledgy builds cap table management software specifically for companies and their employees working across multiple countries. Ledgy’s platform covers tools for finance, HR, legal and VC teams and employees themselves, and it is used to provide a snapshot of the state of a company’s equity at a given moment and to help employees and companies manage what they may choose to do with that over time. Ledgy integrates with the Semper secondary platform, Pave and Figures compensation benchmarking platforms, and over 40 HRIS platforms such as Hibob, Personio, and Workday. Ledgy is also the preferred investment management partner for the portfolios of over 50 leading venture capitalists and accelerators such as Techstars, Entrepreneur First and APX.

Currently, ledgy counts some 2,500 companies in 45 countries as customers, 500 more than a year ago. Among the customers are copmanies such as Getir, Kry, Monese, Selina Finance, Gorillas, Choco, Alan, Pennylane, Scalapay, as well as wefox and Yokoy. The company also has more than 25,000 stakeholders who can view their equity at any time. As mentioned by CEO and co-founder Yoko Spirig to Techcrunch, the startup’s revenues have also doubled, and the team grew from 15 people to more than 65 in the last year.

Besides growing the team, the fresh funds will flow into advancing the product. According to Yoko in her blog, the company wants to help companies scale by providing them with the best product to run equity in multiple countries. Furthermore, the startup wants to make it easy for stakeholders and teams that handle equity to automate time-consuming processes such as creating, sharing, signing, and storing contracts for each new employee grant. Along with these product enhancements, the startup will use the capital to accelerate the ecosystem’s understanding of equity and strengthen its presence in Europe by opening a new office in Berlin, adding to its two offices in Zurich and London.

These goals should contribute to addressing the current global talent retention challenges. “Through our fundraising process, it became even more clear that although more European companies are founded with global ambitions, attracting and retaining the best talent in Europe is still extremely complex,” says Yoko.

Ledgy has also announced that Jonathan Golden has joined its board in line with the financing round. He brings a wealth of product experience from his time with exceptional companies like Airbnb, Dropbox and Hubspot. He will be a valuable asset in helping Ledgy build the definitive equity experience for companies and teams.

“Through my lens as an investor at NEA, combined with my past experience, I’ve seen the central role ownership plays in building enduring companies. The equity management challenge is especially acute in Europe, with different legal structures governing equity in every country. Ledgy has created a smart and powerful equity software platform and built an incredible, best-in-class team to support it. Yoko, Ben and Timo understand the challenges faced by companies as they scale, and we are thrilled to partner with the Ledgy team as they continue to reinvent how companies think about equity and ownership,” says Jonathan.

(Press release/RAN)