Announcing the Open Cap Table Excel Standard (OCX)

The Open Cap Table Coalition is excited to announce the release of the Open Cap Table Excel Standard (OCX), which standardizes practices across law firms and software solutions for equity data based on the Open Cap Table Data Format (OCF).

The equity ecosystem is comprised of many players, with different and often conflicting practices of how to handle, display and store equity data. The integration of human review and input into this process has always been challenging. The OCX standard should drive how these processes are run by standardizing the messy and often conflicting practices for law firms and equity solution providers around the OCF standard.

The OCX allows a standardized OCF cap table to be displayed consistently to any human reviewer. It will also permit the human reviewer to interact with the equity data in a standard way in the future that will enable seamless and accurate movement of equity data through various transactional processes as well as across service providers and software platforms.

Version 1.0 of OCX is focused on the “summary cap table,” and was produced collaboratively by the Law Firm Working Group of the OCT, including Cooley; DLA Piper; Fasken Martineau DuMoulin; Fenwick & West; Goodwin Procter; Gunderson Dettmer Stough Villeneuve Franklin & Hachigian; Latham & Watkins; Lowenstein Sandler; Morrison & Foerster; Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe; Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt; Perkins Coie; and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

You can access the open source OCX standard at https://github.com/captable/ocx/.

Members of the Open Cap Table Coalition will start to implement best practices around the adoption of OCX and OCF this year, including:

• Releasing OCX templates and guidelines for internal adoption and cross-coalition use
• Conducting education and training on OCX standards
• Implementing OCX to OCF conversion tooling in practices
• Building integration points between OCX-compliant Excel files and other OCF-compliant systems into business processes

We are excited to continue improving the interoperability, transparency, and portability of startup cap table data through the release of OCX. Please visit opencaptablecoalition.com for more details on the Open Cap Table Coalition and how to get involved.