Stock options can hold a lot of potential reward for employees when their company is doing well, but not every person will have the funds to fully exercise — that is, buy up — the options they have available to them. Enter EquityBee, a marketplace for employees to connect with capital from a network of some 12,000 investors to finance the process. The startup has been on a growth tear this year, and to continue building out features on its platform, and expanding its reach, the company today is announcing $ 55 million in equity funding of its own.
The Series B is being led by Group 11, with Battery Ventures, Latitude, Local Globe, Greenfield Partners and ICON also participating. Exact valuation is not being disclosed, but Oren Barzilai, EquityBee’s co-founder and CEO, said it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The funding is coming amid a lot of investor buzz (pun intended) around the Tel Aviv/Palo Alto-based startup: EquityBee raised $ 20 million only seven months ago. And in the process of working on this story, this latest round was bumped up by $ 7 million.
EquityBee is filling an interesting, often under-the-radar gap in the world of stock options. Many tech employees — especially those at startups — calculate options as part of their remuneration packages (and indeed, when options are not an option, that can be controversial). Indeed, in the U.S. alone there are some 6 million startup employees today that have some form of equity.
But in a lot of cases, employees aren’t fully able to take advantage of what they can on the options front, because buying them up can be costly.
Published by Techcrunch — on September 29, 2021
The Series B is being led by Group 11, with Battery Ventures, Latitude, Local Globe, Greenfield Partners and ICON also participating. Exact valuation is not being disclosed, but Oren Barzilai, EquityBee’s co-founder and CEO, said it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The funding is coming amid a lot of investor buzz (pun intended) around the Tel Aviv/Palo Alto-based startup: EquityBee raised $ 20 million only seven months ago. And in the process of working on this story, this latest round was bumped up by $ 7 million.
EquityBee is filling an interesting, often under-the-radar gap in the world of stock options. Many tech employees — especially those at startups — calculate options as part of their remuneration packages (and indeed, when options are not an option, that can be controversial). Indeed, in the U.S. alone there are some 6 million startup employees today that have some form of equity.
But in a lot of cases, employees aren’t fully able to take advantage of what they can on the options front, because buying them up can be costly.
Published by Techcrunch — on September 29, 2021