Ledgy, the equity management platform for high-growth international startups, today announced a $22 million (€22m / £19m) Series B funding round led by global venture capital firm, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from Sequoia Capital, Speedinvest, btov, Visionaries Club and VI Partners, as well as existing angel investors. This comes one year after its $10 million Series A, led by Sequoia, which saw Luciana Lixandru (Partner, Sequoia) join Ledgy’s board. As part of the Series B funding, Jonathan Golden, Partner at NEA, will also now join the Ledgy board. Ledgy will use the funds to hire top-class talent, increase the pace of product and feature development, and solidify its market presence in Europe.

Born out of Europe’s complex jurisdictional landscape, Ledgy empowers startup founders to build global companies by providing a key part of the infrastructure needed to attract, engage, incentivise and retain top international talent. Ledgy moves equity management off of high-maintenance, error-prone spreadsheets and onto a platform that gives all company stakeholders (i.e. founders, investors and employees) visibility and insight into what the equity ownership component of their remuneration packages means to them.

With its ability to run different country-specific equity plans side-by-side, leadership teams can trust that the platform will treat all stakeholders fairly, and provide a single source of truth. All while relieving the financial team of complex administrative processes and enabling HR and People Teams to confidently hire cross-border talent. Besides ensuring compliance and risk reduction, Ledgy increases transparency, tangibility and visibility into equity management, while also automating the labour-intensive tasks of creating, sharing, signing and storing of contracts for each new grant to employees.

Ledgy integrates with secondary platform Semper, compensation benchmarking platforms Pave and Figures as well as over 40 HRIS platforms, such as Hibob, Personio and Workday. Ledgy is also the equity management partner of choice for the portfolios of over 50 leading venture capitalist firms and accelerators, such as Techstars, Entrepreneur First and APX. Ledgy’s customers include some of the most exciting companies in Europe, like: Getir, Kry, Monese, Selina Finance, Gorillas, Choco, Alan, Pennylane, Scalapay, wefox and Yokoy to name just a few.

“In the past 12 months, we have enjoyed double-digit monthly growth. We have gone from 15 to 65 employees, expanded our customer base to over 45 countries and 2,500 companies, opened a London office and grown our presence in Berlin, and we’re just getting started,” said Ledgy Co-founder and CEO, Yoko Spirig. “The participation of top tier VCs in our Series B is significant for two reasons. First, it’s a powerful validation of Ledgy and our strong growth in the 12 months since our Series A. Second, it reflects a significant trend in which leading US investors are increasing their exposure to the European continent by partnering with the best companies in what is a fast-growing and vibrant startup ecosystem.”

Jonathan Golden, Partner at NEA added: “Through my lens as an investor at NEA, combined with my past experience at category-defining companies like Airbnb, Dropbox and Hubspot, I’ve seen the central role ownership plays in building enduring companies. The equity management challenge is especially acute in Europe, with different legal structures governing equity in every country. Ledgy has created a smart and powerful equity software platform and built an incredible, best-in-class team to support it. Yoko, Ben and Timo understand the challenges faced by companies as they scale, and we are thrilled to partner with the Ledgy team as they continue to reinvent how companies think about equity and ownership.”

Artificial intelligence company Peak, which employs over 350 people internationally, raised $75 million in Series C funding in 2021, at which point they started working with Ledgy. John Fraser, Peak’s Finance Director, said: “Company culture, team engagement and employee wellbeing have always been incredibly important to us at Peak. Part of that is always looking to build a more productive and meaningful culture of ownership within the team. Working with Ledgy, we have created a new share option award across the business. It's been well received and knocked days – not hours, days – off the process for my team. Compared to what we had before, it's night and day.”