Pulley shuts down after raising more than $50M to challenge Carta

Why it matters

Pulley's closure shows how hard it is to dislodge software embedded in legal, finance and investor workflows.

Yin Wu is shutting down Pulley, the cap-table software business she founded in 2019 to give founders a clearer view of who owned their startups. Pulley announced the closure on September 15th and will cease operations after December 8th, according to Business Insider.

Carta, Pulley's larger rival in equity-management software, has agreed to help migrate customers. Founders who choose Carta can keep their Pulley pricing for the first year, while Carta will credit the unused portion of their Pulley subscriptions. The arrangement gives customers a defined landing spot for records that can include stock issuances, option grants, SAFEs, valuations and board approvals.

It also gives Pulley's final chapter a pointed ending. Wu built Pulley as the founder-friendly alternative to Carta. Seven years later, Carta is handling the exit.

Several swings before Pulley

Pulley was the product of lessons Wu accumulated across several attempts at building startups. She studied computer science at Stanford, left before graduating to join Y Combinator and founded AdRaid, which inserted advertising into online video. AdRaid raised about $1 million and closed after failing to find enough demand, according to Forbes' profile of Wu.

Wu followed AdRaid with Prim, a same-day laundry service that closed in 2014. Her next product, the Android notification app Echo, reached more than 5 million downloads before Microsoft acquired it in 2015. Wu worked at Microsoft for roughly two years, then made a brief attempt at building a blockchain-based information curation product before founding Pulley.

The cap-table idea came from Wu's experience on the other side of those financings and exits. In a 2020 LinkedIn post, she wrote that she had gone through Y Combinator three times and raised millions before she understood cap tables and equity. Pulley would turn ownership math, dilution scenarios and equity grants into tools founders could operate without repeatedly calling a lawyer.

Pulley joined Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. An October 21st, 2020 funding announcement said Stripe led its $10 million Series A, with General Catalyst, 8VC and Caffeinated Capital participating. On July 13th, 2022, Pulley announced a $40 million Series B led by Founders Fund, with Stripe, Elad Gil, Jack Altman and Avichal Garg returning. The round was reported at a $250 million valuation.

Pulley raised more than $50 million in total.

A challenger catches Carta at a vulnerable moment

Pulley's strongest opening came in January 2024, when Linear CEO Karri Saarinen accused Carta of trying to trade Linear shares without authorization. The controversy involving Carta's secondary-market practices helped founders consider alternatives to a provider entrusted with sensitive ownership data.

Wu moved quickly. Pulley offered to offset customers' existing cap-table contracts if they switched. Forbes reported that demo requests increased eightfold and about 400 customers signed up, bringing Pulley to 4,600 customers in February 2024 from 2,200 at the beginning of 2023.

That burst validated Wu's read on the market: trust could move cap-table customers, despite the work required to migrate years of legal and financial records. Pulley made trust central to its sales pitch and argued that founders should have direct control over their ownership data.

The episode also showed Carta's structural advantage. Cap-table software sits inside financing rounds, legal reviews, tax work and investor reporting. Every additional law firm, investor and finance executive familiar with a platform reduces the friction of staying on it. A challenger can win customers during a controversy and still face years of work replacing those accumulated relationships.

Carta handles the landing

Carta had sharpened that advantage into an explicit competitive pitch before Pulley's closure. In a March 10th, 2026 comparison page, Carta argued that Pulley lacked the product breadth required by startups as their financing and reporting needs grew.

Scale matters when customers need to transfer a system of record. A cap-table migration requires reconciling the ownership ledger with incorporation documents, financing agreements, option plans, individual grants and stakeholder details. Errors can surface during fundraising, an audit or an acquisition, when the cost of correcting them is highest.

Pulley's customer email said the transition plan was designed to prevent service disruptions. Founders still have to decide whether Carta is the right destination and verify that the migrated ledger matches the legal documents supporting it. Pulley's December 8th cutoff creates a firm timetable for that work.

The financing and customer counts do not explain why Pulley is shutting down. Revenue, ARR, profitability and final headcount are not public, leaving the company's economics unresolved.

In her September 15th statement, Wu wrote that she and many of Pulley's strongest employees had "no intention of riding off quietly into the night." Her immediate job is less romantic: preserving customers' ownership records and completing an orderly migration to the rival she spent seven years challenging.

Wu has closed products before, sold one to Microsoft and returned to build again. Her next move after Pulley's shutdown is not established.