Gunderson Dettmer and Pulley are excited to announce a new integration allowing Gunderson’s newly incorporated startups to have the relevant information from their formation documents automatically populate a Pulley cap table without requiring manual data entry. This integration marks a major milestone for the venture ecosystem because it is the first public example of two organizations using the Open Cap Table Coalition’s open-source cap table data standard (OCF) to facilitate a seamless digital handoff of cap table information, in this case, from a law firm to a cap table platform.

Both Gunderson Dettmer and Pulley are members of the Open Cap Table Coalition. Gunderson is a founding member of the Coalition and serves on its Steering Committee. The Coalition—which started in 2021 with a mission to improve the interoperability, transparency and portability of startup cap table data—has grown to more than fifty members, including the top law firms in the venture ecosystem, all of the major cap table platforms, as well as a variety of cap table-adjacent providers of software and financial services to private and public companies.

The technical integration between Gunderson and Pulley is powered by a proprietary web application called Cap Express developed by Gunderson’s legal engineering team. When Gunderson incorporates a new startup, its lawyers use coded document templates together with web-based document automation software (Thomson Reuters’ Contract Express) to generate all of the necessary documentation. The Cap Express app then extracts the relevant cap table data from a newly incorporated startup company’s formation documents via the Contract Express API, repackages the information into a valid OCF file package and submits it to an API endpoint set up by Pulley to receive the information.

To facilitate this integration, the Pulley team set up the API endpoint to accept the OCF cap table information from Cap Express and mapped the information to its own data structure using the open-source OCF data schema. Now, when a Gunderson lawyer pushes the information from Cap Express and logs into the Pulley platform, all of the information is pre-populated and waiting to be approved, saving time spent on manual data entry to get the company’s Pulley cap table up and running.

This integration represents a proof of concept for the Coalition’s claims that using OCF as the industry standard data format for cap table information can vastly improve the interoperability of systems and organizations that need to interact with a company’s cap table. Gunderson’s Cap Express tooling can submit cap table data to any other cap table platform that supports importing the OCF data format, and Pulley’s endpoint can accept OCF information from other law firms. Gunderson was proud to work with its client Pulley as its first integration partner for Cap Express because of Pulley’s commitment to working with founders and their law firms to provide the most seamless cap table management experience in the marketplace.

Pulley Announcement

About Gunderson Dettmer 

Gunderson Dettmer is the preeminent international law firm with an exclusive focus on the innovation economy. The firm serves market-leading venture capital and growth equity investors and pioneering companies through inception, growth and maturity, as well as groundbreaking public companies that result from the global venture capital ecosystem. The firm’s clear-cut focus and well-honed technical skill enables an accelerated pace and unmatched efficiency, delivering best-in-class value at each phase of a client’s business.