You won't have to raid your savings to exercise shares whose future value isn't guaranteed.
Get your estimate in less than 5 minutes, and cash in the bank within 3 business days.
Vested is private and secure. Your information is confidential.
With options, you don't actually own a piece of the company — you are not a shareholder. Rather, you have the right (the option) to buy a certain number of shares at a fixed price (your strike price).
If you don't spend the money to exercise options, you never actually get shares.
Take a look at your option agreement (it should be among your employment papers). The number of shares times your strike price equals the purchase price for your shares. On top of that, you may owe taxes, which are sometimes more than the total strike price itself!
Even if you have enough cash saved, it may not make sense for you to spend it all on an options exercise.
Far too many employees at early- and mid-stage startups miss out on the value of their options.
Sometimes they wait too long, and by the time they wish to exercise the tax costs have become insurmountable. Other times, the options expire 90 days after they leave their company (as is usually the case), and they cannot get the cash together in time.
Vested provides you with cash to exercise your options, at no risk to you.
What’s in it for Vested? If the shares end up being worth a lot, Vested gets some of the upside. If the shares end up being worth nothing, you have zero obligation to Vested.
Vested option funding is done through a contract: cash today in exchange for a fixed number of shares in the future when the shares become transferable (for example, after an IPO or other liquidity event).
First, we collect (confidentially) simple information about you and your option grants in order to determine (1) how many options you will exercise and their strike price, and (2) the taxes associated with that exercise (and, if applicable, with our option funding deal). With that, we calculate the total amount of cash you need.
Then, based on our proprietary target price per share for your company, we calculate the number of shares deliverable to us in exchange for us providing the cash you need.
With that, we have the key terms for your options funding deal. This can all take 10 minutes or less.
From there, if you choose to accept the deal, we may ask for some documentation supporting the information you've provided.
Finally, we sign a contract and wire the funds!
We're very flexible, and we try to avoid putting hard limits on cash amounts or other terms. That said, at this time we mostly fund only U.S. deals, where both the person we're funding and the underlying company are based in U.S. In addition, your company must have raised venture capital.
We can provide an estimate in as little as 10 minutes, and in the past we've been able to wire funds in just 72 hours from when the process started.
If your shares end up being worthless, you don't owe us anything — we write off the contract. You only owe us if and when your shares become liquid or if you otherwise receive value for them.
Our funding contract is intended to avoid violating common transfer restrictions. Importantly, the contract does not require you to transfer shares to us unless and until by definition the transfer restrictions have been lifted (for example, in an IPO).
With transfer restrictions, companies are primarily concerned with controlling who formally holds their stock, because that determines who has voting and other stockholder rights. We respect that, which is why we designed our contract the way we did. We can still help employees get the value of the equity for which they've worked hard.
We take extremely seriously the confidentiality of your information and the fact of your participation in an option funding deal. Neither your name nor other identifying information will ever appear publicly on our platform.