Getting started

Tenacap is a flat-rate cap-table platform for pre-seed through Series B founders. This guide walks through the first session end to end: creating an account, adding your company, getting your ownership records in, and inviting the people who need to see them. No part of this requires a sales call or a credit card.

Create your account

Head to the sign-up page and register with your email, or continue with Google. Your login belongs to you, not to any one company — a single account can hold or be invited to several companies, which matters if you found more than one or also advise others.

Add your company

After signing in you arrive at your workspace home. Choose Create a company and enter the essentials: legal name, jurisdiction (V1 is built around the US Delaware C-corp), and formation date. This creates the entity that every share class, stakeholder, and transaction will hang off of.

That’s all it takes to set up the company — you don’t have to build the cap table in the same sitting. Creating the company and building its cap table are two separate steps on purpose: the person who opens the account is often not the person who owns the cap table. So after you create the company you land on its dashboard with three ways forward.

Populate your cap table

From the new company’s dashboard you have three equal choices: build the cap table by hand with a guided wizard, hand it to whoever owns the details— a CFO, controller, or attorney — or import a cap table you already have. Starting a brand-new company with nothing to import is a first-class path, not an afterthought. The hand-off option is why setup and onboarding are separate: whoever you invite lands on this same dashboard and picks up right where you left off, without you having to finish the cap table first. The two hands-on options:

Option A — Import what you already have

If your cap table lives in Carta, Pulley, or a spreadsheet, import it. Tenacap parses the file, reconciles every total against the source, and shows you a preview — stakeholders, share classes, securities, and any exceptions — before a single record is committed. You confirm, then it writes the whole ledger atomically. The full walk-through, including how to produce the right export from each tool, is in Importing your cap table.

Option B — Build it by hand

Choosing “Build it by hand” opens a short wizard that builds a real, founder-issued cap table on the company you just created — no spreadsheet required. It walks you through:

1. Founders & shares — add each founder and how many shares they hold. The wizard creates a “Common Stock” class (10,000,000 authorized by default, which you can change) and issues the shares on the ledger for you.
2. Option pool (optional) — reserve a pool for future hires; a 10% pool is offered as a starting point.
3. SAFEs (optional) — record any outstanding SAFEs you’ve already raised.

A final review shows each founder’s fully-diluted ownership before anything is written. Confirm, and you land on a populated cap table — then add restricted stock, option grants, and everything else from Managing your cap table as you go. The fully-diluted ownership view stays current automatically.

Invite your team & advisors

A cap table is most useful when the right people can see it. Invite founders, employees, and investors to the read-only stakeholder portal, where each person sees only their own holdings, vesting, and estimated value. Attorney and fractional-CFO seats are free on every tier, so there’s never a per-seat reason to keep an advisor out.

Where to go next

Once the basics are in, these are the most common next stops:

• SAFEs & convertibles — record terms and generate a YC post-money SAFE to send for signature.
• Scenario modeling — model your next priced round and watch SAFEs convert before you commit.
• Compliance & tax — 409A valuations, 83(b) tracking, Rule 701, and QSBS.
• Export & open schema — your data leaves in an open format whenever you want it to.