Pulley shuts down Dec 8. Export your cap table now.

Pulley is shutting down. The company's own site states it plainly: operations and services cease on December 8, 2026. TechCrunch reports the cap table platform was founded in 2020 by Yin Wu, raised over $50 million from General Catalyst, Stripe and Founders Fund, and has partnered with its larger rival Carta to hand over customers — who can keep their current Pulley pricing for the first year and get credit for unused subscription time. No reason for the shutdown was given. If you are a Pulley customer, the deadline is the story. If you are not, the vendor shutdown pattern is.

What actually happened

A well-funded company with tier-one investors and seven years of operating history is turning off a system of record. Not pivoting. Not getting acquired into a larger product. Turning off.

The soft landing is genuinely decent — an exclusive transition to Carta with price protection beats the usual "thank you for being a customer, here is a CSV, good luck." But the shape of it matters more than the terms. Your equity ledger, the one your lawyers and your employees rely on, is moving to a vendor you did not choose, on a date you did not pick.

A former employee speculated publicly that Pulley's real competitor was spreadsheets, and that AI made spreadsheets good enough. That is speculation, not a stated reason, and we will not report it as one. But it points at something real: the thin-SaaS layer between a spreadsheet and a regulated filing is getting squeezed from both directions.

Why it matters for your business

We keep writing some version of this post because operators keep learning it the expensive way. Funding is not durability. $50 million and Founders Fund on the cap table bought Pulley seven years, not permanence.

Run an export today, not on December 7. Not a screenshot, not a PDF board deck — the structured data. Share classes, option grants, vesting schedules, exercise history, 409A inputs. If the export does not round-trip into a spreadsheet you could hand a lawyer, it is not an export.

Know which vendors hold a system of record. There is a real difference between a tool that helps you work and a tool that is the authoritative copy of something. Cap table, payroll, invoices, customer list, order history. For those, the question is not "is this a good product" — it is "what do I have if this disappears in 90 days."

Migration windows are staffing decisions. Pulley gave roughly twelve weeks. That is generous by industry standards and still lands on top of whatever you already planned for Q4. The teams that handle this well are the ones who already knew where the data lived.

Price protection expires. The Carta offer holds Pulley pricing for one year. Put the renewal date in the calendar now, at the real number, and decide then instead of discovering it on an invoice.

Sources: Pulley, TechCrunch.