Why cap table software for India needs its own profile
Most cap-table tools are written for Delaware. Ownership is "common stock", early money is a SAFE, the valuation on file is a 409A, and ten million shares renders as 10,000,000. Run an Indian Pvt Ltd through that lens and you spend your time translating: equity shares get relabelled "common", your CCD gets shoehorned into a SAFE template, and every number needs mental re-grouping before you can read it out to your CA or your board.
Vquity ships a dedicated India region profile instead. It covers the states where Indian startups actually incorporate (Karnataka, Maharashtra, Delhi NCR, and more), models the company as a Private Limited company, and puts the local instrument set on the menu: Equity Shares on the cap table, ESOP options for the team, and Convertible Notes and CCDs for early money. A CCD, a Compulsorily Convertible Debenture, is a debenture that must convert into equity shares; there is no cash-redemption path. That equity-like character is why Indian rounds lean on the CCD where a US round would reach for a SAFE.
The profile also changes how the whole app reads. Currency is INR and digit grouping follows Indian numbering, so a 10,00,000-option pool is ten lakh and a 1,00,00,000-share ledger is one crore, in tables, statements, and portals alike. And the valuation record carries the label your paperwork does: a Valuation Report. Vquity tracks that report's lifecycle (recalculation, rollback, audit trail, and an alert before it goes stale) while the report itself comes from your registered valuer or merchant banker, as it should.
Worked example: converting a CCD in a priced round
Here is the shape of a typical Indian conversion, with the numbers formatted the way you'd read them.
Worked example
A Bengaluru-registered Pvt Ltd has 80,00,000 founder equity shares and a 10,00,000-option ESOP pool, so 90,00,000 shares fully diluted. An angel invested ₹1,50,00,000 (₹1.5 crore) through a CCD carrying a 20% discount to the next priced round. The Series A now prices the company at ₹90 crore pre-money on those 90,00,000 fully diluted shares, ₹100 per share, and a new investor puts in ₹12 crore.
The new investor's ₹12,00,00,000 buys 12,00,000 equity shares at ₹100. The CCD converts at ₹80 (20% off the round price), so ₹1,50,00,000 ÷ ₹80 = 1,87,500 equity shares. Post-close there are 1,03,87,500 shares, about 1.04 crore. Founders hold 77.0%, the ESOP pool 9.6%, the CCD holder 1.8%, and the new investor 11.6%. The discount bought the CCD holder shares at ₹80 while new money paid ₹100, a 1.25× price advantage for backing the company early.
Two honest notes on that math. First, if your CCD carries a coupon, Vquity converts the amount you confirm (it does not silently accrue interest for you), so add any accrued coupon to the conversion value before you close. Venture CCDs typically carry a nominal coupon, so in practice this is usually just the principal. Second, run the numbers before the term sheet is signed: the scenario modeler chains the round and shows the dilution (here, founders go from 88.9% to 77.0%) while everything is still hypothetical. The free dilution calculator is a quick first pass.
How the profile plays with rounds, grants, and diligence
When the round is real, the close-round wizard converts your outstanding convertibles, tops up the ESOP pool to the negotiated post-round percentage, and captures a pre-close snapshot in one atomic operation, so the cap table never sits half-closed. Every share count and rupee amount along the way renders in Indian format.
ESOP grants run through the full options and vesting lifecycle: schedules, cliffs, milestones, and accelerations in a vesting ledger, a pool-utilization chart that shows how much of your ten-lakh pool is committed, and a public grant-accept link that produces a signed PDF. Employees and investors then follow their holdings through passwordless portals: stocks, options, convertibles, documents, and a tax view, in INR with Indian grouping.
For diligence season, the Data Room organizes roughly 120 document types into eight sections with a readiness score, so the share certificates, board consents, and valuation reports an investor's counsel will ask for are already filed. An INR-denominated rolling grant-activity view and consent tracking on the governance side help you keep the record organized without pretending to decide Companies Act, FEMA, tax, or filing obligations.
If you want the concepts before the tooling, the Academy covers how SAFEs and convertibles work and how equity differs across regions, including where a CCD and a SAFE genuinely part ways. Cross-border structures are common too: a US parent runs on the United States profile, a Singapore holdco on the Singapore/SEA profile, each with its own instruments and valuation label.
The fastest way to judge cap table software for an Indian company is to point it at one. Create yours with the India profile, or explore the seeded sample company first, at lisan.org/vquity.