Pulley raised a $40M Series B in July 2022 led by Keith Rabois at Founders Fund, with participation from existing investors including Stripe and Elad Gil. Rabois joined the board, and the financing brought total funding to approximately $50M.

Yin Wu and Grant Oladipo founded the company in 2019, and Pulley participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. Wu had previously sold a company to Microsoft and built Pulley around helping founders understand ownership and dilution before making hiring and fundraising decisions.

The September 2026 shutdown announcement describes an exclusive customer-transition partnership with Carta. It does not announce an acquisition or a purchase price, so the migration arrangement should not be treated as a new financing valuation or an exit consideration for shareholders.

Pulley is an equity-management platform for private-company founders, finance teams, and employees. It combines a cap table—a record of who owns shares, options, and other ownership rights—with documents and workflows for issuing equity, modeling a fundraise, and preparing financial reports.

A founder starts by supplying incorporation documents, financing agreements, and existing equity records. Pulley's onboarding team reconstructs the ownership history and checks the resulting cap table; the founder can then model how a new investment or convertible financing would change each shareholder's ownership before approving a transaction.

When hiring, a company can prepare an offer showing the employee's equity, send the relevant grant documents for signature, obtain board approval, and track vesting. Employees access their own holdings through a stakeholder portal, while finance and legal teams use the same records for option exercises, tax forms, and reporting rather than maintaining separate spreadsheets.

Pulley's broader toolkit includes 409A valuations, stock-based compensation reporting under ASC 718, and integrations with HR systems such as Gusto and Rippling. A partnership with Nasdaq Private Market supports company-controlled secondary liquidity programs, connecting the ownership record with transactions in which employees or investors sell shares.

Crypto companies can manage traditional equity alongside token allocations, vesting schedules, lockups, and distributions. Pulley connects with external custody and payroll providers to coordinate token delivery and withholding information; the software does not make a token allocation equivalent to a company share.

These capabilities are subject to the announced winddown. Pulley says normal app access and support end on December 8, with limited data access continuing until January 31, 2027.

Pulley sells subscriptions to companies that need to maintain their ownership records and administer equity. Its published pricing lists a $1,200 annual Startup plan including 25 stakeholders and a $3,500 Growth plan including 40 stakeholders, with additional stakeholder and enterprise arrangements negotiated separately; the Growth tier adds services such as 409A valuations and compliance workflows.

The economic buyer can move from a founder handling the first financing to a finance or legal team responsible for a larger workforce and more complex equity programs. More stakeholders and additional reporting needs can increase contract value, while managed services create a way to charge for work that a customer would otherwise perform internally or through outside advisers.

Delivering the service requires software development, secure hosting, support, and specialists who validate cap tables and perform valuation or administrative work. Reusing the same records across grants, exercises, and reporting can reduce duplicate work, but expert onboarding and support remain delivery costs; a larger customer count alone does not establish high margins.

During the transition, customers choosing Carta must sign a new 12-month agreement. Pulley says Carta will honor the customer's existing pricing for the first full year and credit unused prepaid subscription time, so the arrangement concerns migration of customer relationships rather than continuation of Pulley's subscription business indefinitely.

Carta is Pulley's most consequential competitor and its chosen migration partner, combining cap-table software with a wider network of companies, investors, and service providers. Pulley's original positioning emphasized founder usability, transparent pricing, and ownership of customer data, while the shutdown makes migration reliability more important than feature differentiation for its remaining customers.

Carta competes through the breadth of its equity-management platform and connections to the broader private-company financing ecosystem. A cap table becomes more useful when valuations, board activity, employee equity, and investor reporting share consistent records, creating an advantage for a provider that can cover more of those workflows.

Pulley offered a simpler founder-focused entry point and support with onboarding, but those advantages now sit within a time-limited service. Its exclusive transition arrangement gives Carta a direct route to customer relationships, subject to each customer's consent and a new contract.

Enterprise equity platforms compete for finance and compensation teams with complex reporting and employee-plan needs, while smaller companies can continue using spreadsheets and outside counsel. Pulley's appeal was consolidating these records and tasks before spreadsheet administration became unwieldy; the alternative could still be attractive when a company's structure is simple or an existing provider already satisfies its requirements.

Changing systems also requires checking transaction history, vesting, documents, and valuation records. That reconciliation work makes customer trust and accurate migration important competitive factors beyond the subscription price.

Pulley's product set addressed more than the founder's initial need to record shareholders: it also reached token operations and finance-team reporting budgets. The announced shutdown ends its independent route to pursuing those markets, so these adjacencies describe the scope of the product rather than an announced post-shutdown growth plan.

Token issuers need to track allocations and vesting, apply lockups, coordinate distributions, and communicate with holders. These requirements involve treasury, payroll, and legal operations beyond a traditional shareholder register, giving a provider with both equity and token records access to a different administrative budget.

Pulley's token cap tables and custody integrations supplied a concrete entry point into that work. Realizing the opportunity required reliable integrations and specialist support across different token structures; the published winddown means it should not be counted as continuing independent expansion.

Later-stage companies need stock-based compensation accounting, audit-ready records, and processes for employee share sales. Those buyers are finance and compensation teams managing recurring reporting and transaction work, rather than only founders maintaining an early cap table.

Pulley's reporting tools, managed services, and Nasdaq Private Market relationship connected its ownership records to those needs. The transition now requires customers to establish which capabilities, pricing, and historical records carry over to their next provider.

Winddown and access loss: Pulley has announced that normal service and support end on December 8, 2026, with limited data access ending January 31, 2027. Customers that delay exports or migration risk losing convenient access to records needed for grants, exercises, fundraising, and audits.

Migration errors: Equity records combine historical transactions, signed documents, vesting schedules, and valuations that must remain consistent after a move. Missing or incorrectly mapped information could create expensive reconciliation work even when the headline share totals appear correct.

Continuity of customer terms: The Carta transition requires a new agreement, and the price match and prepaid credit apply under the migration offer rather than guaranteeing unchanged terms forever. Customers moving elsewhere face their own data-transfer work because Pulley says it cannot assist migrations to other providers.