How Vested uses Carta APIs to streamline employee stock option funding

Startup employees put their blood, sweat, and tears into helping their companies succeed, but many don’t reap the rewards of their hard work since they can’t afford to buy their stock options. Vested wants to change that by helping everyday employees get the money they need to exercise their stock options with no out-of-pocket costs.

Over 85% of Vested’s customers have their equity holdings on Carta, so when Vested learned about Carta’s Developer Platform, Vested was excited about how it could improve user experience and streamline processes. Carta’s Portfolio API allows organizations to enable shared users to link their Carta accounts and sync their personal equity data for use cases like option funding, personal finance management, wealth advising, and other financial needs.

Customers can link their grants in seconds

Vested eliminates the need for expensive loans and monthly service fees by providing cash in exchange for a certain amount of an employee’s shares. To give an accurate funding estimate, a Vested user needs to fill out an application with their equity grant information including number of shares, exercise price, and their company’s fair market value (FMV)—all of which is available on Carta.

“Before integrating with Carta, our customers had to manually input their company’s fair market value and equity grant information, which was tedious and error-prone—and took 10 minutes,” said Dave Thornton, Vested co-founder & CEO. “Now, it takes seconds to link their grants and makes the application process seamless.”

Accurate funding proposals every time

When a user fills out an application on Vested, they receive a funding estimate based on the information they provide. It shows the amount of money Vested will pay to cover the cost of exercise and estimated taxes in exchange for a set number of the user’s shares. Then Vested’s deal team will review and give a final funding proposal.

“When users manually input their equity information, they don’t always get the details right, which leads to inaccurate funding estimates,” said Dave.

In the past, after a funding proposal was submitted, Vested’s deal team had to manually cross-check the application using View access on a user’s Carta account. If a user entered inaccurate information, the deal team would have to reach out with a revised funding proposal. Especially in the situation where a user put in a too-high FMV, this could create a bit of whiplash that all parties would have preferred to avoid. Moreover, correcting a funding proposal also eats into the Vested deal team’s time.

Now, a user can connect their Carta account in seconds and automatically pull in the necessary information for Vested’s option funding workflow, and be provided with better estimates faster. With more accurate data and funding estimates, Vested’s deal team has been able to reduce the amount of time spent corresponding with the average applicant by 38%.

“A decrease in customer interactions of this magnitude is clearly driven by having better data in the application process,” said Dave. “This not only streamlines our internal operations, but also significantly enhances our customer experience.”