The ledger that tracks who owns what in your company (every founder, employee, investor, SAFE holder, and option grant), usually expressed as percentages and share counts on a fully-diluted basis.
Carta (originally eShares) launched in 2012 selling a single insight: cap tables in Excel are catastrophic. Founders lose track of grants, investors fight over percentages, and acquisition due diligence becomes a nightmare. By 2021 Carta had digitized the cap tables of half the US venture-backed market — a $7.4B company built on a spreadsheet replacement.
