// Blog

Pulley Is Shutting Down: What Non-US Founders Should Do Before December 8

2026-10-07 · Govy

Pulley is shutting down. The company announced on September 15, 2026 that it will cease operations on December 8, 2026, after seven years spent trying to out-build Carta. If your cap table lives on Pulley, you have until then to move it — Carta is offering an assisted transition with first-year pricing matched to your current plan, but that offer is exclusive to Carta, and for founders outside the US, moving to Carta usually trades one bad fit for another.

Here's what's actually happening, what the Carta default does and doesn't solve, and what to check before you pick where your cap table lands next.

The actual timeline

Pulley raised more than $50 million from investors including Founders Fund and Stripe to build a modern alternative to Carta. It didn't work out as a standalone business. The shutdown comes with a specific, short runway:

None of this cancels equity that's already been issued. Shares, vested options, and outstanding SAFEs stay legally valid no matter what software tracked them. What disappears is the system of record — the thing that tells you, with confidence, who owns what today. Losing that isn't a legal problem yet, but it becomes one the moment an investor asks for a clean cap table during diligence and you're reconstructing it from memory and old PDFs instead of pulling it from a live ledger.

Worth noticing too: a lot of founders ended up on Pulley specifically because Carta felt too heavy, too US-enterprise, or too expensive once a free tier ran out. That reasoning doesn't expire just because Pulley did. If Carta wasn't the right fit when you first chose a cap table tool, the fact that it's now the default migration path doesn't change what it was never built for — it just makes it the path with the least friction today.

Why "just move to Carta" isn't the full answer

Carta's offer is real: Pulley customers who opt in by November 30 get their Carta pricing matched for the first year, and Carta is handling the migration directly. For a US-incorporated, Delaware C-corp with a straightforward board, that's a reasonable, low-friction landing spot — arguably the path of least resistance.

Three things are worth knowing before you take it, regardless of where you're incorporated:

Carta doesn't do monthly billing. If you're used to Pulley's monthly plans, you're converting to quarterly or annual terms either way. Factor that into the decision instead of discovering it mid-migration.

The migration assistance is exclusive to Carta. If you want to land anywhere else — Govy, Ledgy, Eqvista, or a competitor — you're exporting your own data and reconciling it against source documents yourself. That's not a reason to avoid other options; it's a reason to start earlier than December 7.

Token cap tables aren't part of the deal. If any part of your equity stack is token-based, Carta's transition offer doesn't cover it. You need a separate plan for that piece no matter which cap-table tool you pick for the rest.

And for founders operating outside the US specifically, there's a fourth issue that the migration FAQs don't mention at all: Carta is built around the same assumptions Pulley was. A Delaware C-corp. A 409A valuation to price options. Board consent as the default governance ritual. If your operating company sits under UAE free-zone rules, Saudi commercial law, Nigerian CAMA, or an Indonesian PT structure, those assumptions didn't fit on Pulley either — and Carta, with its heavier enterprise posture and sales-gated pricing above a free-tier stakeholder cap, doesn't close that gap. It's a bigger, better-funded version of the same mismatch.

If that mismatch is new information to you, it's worth reading what actually breaks when a Pulley-shaped tool meets a non-Delaware company — most of it applies to Carta without modification.

What to actually check during this migration

A forced migration is a good moment to fix a cap table's existing problems instead of just copying them to a new login. Before you pick a destination:

  1. Reconcile before you migrate, not after. Check share classes, vesting schedules, and SAFE terms against your actual source documents — signed agreements, board resolutions, incorporation filings. Export errors compound; a wrong vesting start date that migrates cleanly is still wrong.
  2. Does the new tool generate documents your lawyer will actually accept? A cap table that tracks ownership numbers but can't produce a jurisdiction-appropriate grant agreement or shareholders' resolution leaves the actual legal work exactly where it was on Pulley.
  3. Does it handle governance, or just ownership? If your company law requires general assemblies, quorum computation, or shareholding-weighted voting — standard requirements in Saudi Arabia and several other non-US jurisdictions — a pure cap-table tool, Carta included, has no concept of that obligation.
  4. What's the realistic all-in cost once you add back what's missing? A migrated cap table plus a separate data room plus a lightweight CRM for investor pipeline adds up, and none of those tools will share data with each other the way a single ledger does.
  5. Who's actually helping you move, and until when? Carta's assisted path has a hard November 30 opt-in date. Any other provider needs its own export-and-import plan with enough runway before December 8 to catch mistakes.

Where Govy fits for founders making this move

Govy isn't trying to be a bigger Pulley or a cheaper Carta. It's built for the founder whose company doesn't reduce to a Delaware cap table in the first place: jurisdiction-aware ESOP contracts (stock options, RSUs, SARs, phantom shares) for KSA and US/Delaware entities, general assembly governance with shareholding-weighted voting and quorum computation, and a tracked investor data room served on demand from your own Google Drive — your files never leave your Drive.

The migration itself is the same work regardless of destination: export your Pulley data, reconcile it against source documents, and import clean records. The difference is what happens after. One login holds the cap table, the fundraising CRM, the data room, board resolutions, and e-signature — on an append-only, event-sourced ledger where every correction is a recorded VOID, not a silently overwritten cell.

This matters more than usual for a forced migration, because a stakeholder list built outside the US rarely looks like the clean, US-standard structure Pulley and Carta both price around. Friends-and-family rounds, angel syndicates in a different currency, informal advisor grants, employees under two or three different local contracts — that longer, messier list is exactly what per-seat and per-stakeholder pricing penalizes, right at the moment you're already paying the cost of switching tools once.

What Govy won't do: 409A valuations, US secondary transactions, fund administration, or token cap tables. If any of those is the actual gap in your stack, Carta — or a 409A provider alongside whatever tool you land on — is the right call for that piece specifically. Govy also doesn't have Nafath/Absher identity verification or Saudi government registry integration yet. Worth knowing before you commit to a destination, not after you've already exported.

For a broader look at where Carta itself stops working outside the US, The Best Carta Alternative for Global Founders covers the same gap from the other direction.

Whichever tool you pick, the deadline is real and it's close. Reconcile your records now, decide on a destination before late November, and don't let a software shutdown turn into a cap table nobody can trust.

See current plans at govy.tech.

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