Easop: Making It Easy to Grant Equity to International Employees…welcome to the Boldstart family!
There is nothing that gets us more excited at boldstart than partnering with founders who have experienced the pain solved by the product they’re building firsthand. Empathy, an understanding of the user journey, and a clear product vision are a recipe for great products to be built.
Valentin embodies all of that. We first met him when he was the Head of Ops at Cycle, a fellow boldstart portfolio company. While there, he had to figure out how to efficiently hire international workers as a US domiciled company. It’s at this point where the pain point that would become Easop was born.
Today, we are thrilled to announce a $2.5M seed round in Easop, co-led by boldstart and Partech. Easop streamlines the granting of equity to international employees for US-incorporated companies: something that will be increasingly important as everyone from startups to global enterprises embraces the trend of remote and hybrid work. We are lucky to partner with Valentin, Nael, and Thierry on the journey. Easop joins our talented group of European founders spread across the UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Estonia, and Israel.
In only 6 months, Easop has passed over $5M worth of equity that has been granted through the app. Founders, People Ops teams, and employees love the product and I have personally heard from 3 different teams saying Easop has improved the experience for all stakeholders and taught them entirely new things about their grants.
The complexity of granting equity to international employees is enough to make founders want to skip it entirely. In fact, we have seen this happen at many different startups. They would choose to hire remote employees only if they were located in the US, which cut off a large part of the talent pool that was accessible to them.
The challenge is multi-pronged. Germany has different hiring laws than France, India, and the US. Not only are the legal documentation requirements (country-specific addendums, amendments, non-standard agreements, etc.) vast, but there’s also tax complexity. Vested stock options may be considered as compensation even before they’ve been exercised and can be taxed upfront at the time of grant. In some countries, granting equity to local residents may even be especially challenging because of restrictive foreign exchange regulations, such as challenges with transferring funds to exercise or repatriation of proceeds from a sale. This causes a huge issue for employers and employees. Employees face a risk in accepting because of uncertainty of how equity will factor into compensation. For employers, lawyers to manage the process can be costly and hiring employees can be inefficient.
When you factor this complexity in with the exploding trend of remote work, the need for Easop becomes clear. Whether you’re using Deel, Remote, Oyster, or any other employer of record solution, and Carta or Pulley for cap table management, Easop integrates and works alongside these solutions to solve the key issue of granting equity and monitoring regulatory and tax obligations across countries during the entire lifecycle of equity incentives. The team has worked hard to build out a network of preeminent law firms in each country that has validated all documents in order to seamlessly allow any US-incorporated company to hire employees all over the world.
Many of the boldstart portfolio companies are already using Easop to streamline their international hiring. In doing so, they’re learning new things about their ESOP (Employee Stock Option Plan), such as how much of the plan is left post conversion of notes. It has also allowed them to experiment with new ways of showing employees the value of the equity being granted by visualizing the difference between the 409A and preferred share price. Every founder and people leader who uses Easop raves about how much time it’s saving them and how it’s improving the employee experience.
The team is executing on an ambitious roadmap to solve complex legal, tax and communication issues for companies across the globe. If you’re a US company and want to grant equity to your team members outside of the US, Easop covers 50+ countries at the moment with the list growing! To learn more about what they’re building, please visit: https://www.easop.com/.
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