In case you missed it: July 2023

This month, we’ve added a handy ‘No Pay, No Play’ term to funding rounds so you can remove an investor who’s giving you the runaround. We’ve made it easier to choose terms or write your own when you’re setting up a funding round, and made it easy to shrink or expand your option pool.

Read on to find out more about these updates and what’s coming soon.

Contents

What’s new

• Shrink or grow your option pool
• Get an alert when your option pool expires
• Enable ‘No Pay, No Play’ on your round
• Customise your round with more flexibility

Coming soon

• Apply for tax credits with the RDEC scheme
• Easily find your documents and records

Have your say

Shrink or grow your option pool 🏊

You can now reduce as well as expand the size of your option pool on SeedLegals.

Maybe you created an option pool expecting to grant all the options in it, but now you’ve realised that isn’t going to happen. Or you’ve already granted all the options in the pool but need to grant more. Now you have the flexibility to make your option pool whatever size you would like – smaller or bigger, it’s up to you.

Get an alert when your option pool expires ⌛

When you create an option pool, your shareholders authorise you to issue share options from the pool for a certain amount of time. In the UK, it’s 5 years, in France it’s 18 months. We’ve now added reminders to make sure you’re aware of the expiry date.

From 90 days before your option pool expires, when you log into SeedLegals, you’ll see a message to let you know the expiry date is approaching. We’ll also send you an email 30 days before the pool expires.

When your option pool has expired, you’ll see a warning message when you log in.

To renew your option pool, follow these steps. And if you don’t want to update the pool, you can simply remove any expired options.

Enable ‘No Pay, No Play’ on your round ⏰

What happens if an investor is holding up your funding round by not sending you their money? We’ve added No Pay, No Play to funding rounds (Seed, Series A, Series B etc) so you can easily remove a dithering or MIA investor and go ahead to close your round without them.

💡 Tip: With Instant Investment enabled on the round, if the investor does eventually come through, you can add their investment as a top up to the round.

Customise your round with more flexibility 🛠️

Founders doing their first funding round usually choose sensible, straightforward terms. But what if your round is more complicated?

We’ve freshened up our funding round service to make it easier to create your round – no matter how simple or complex.

After looking at the data from thousands of rounds and listening to feedback, we’ve simplified the questionnaire you fill in to create the Term Sheet, Shareholders Agreement and Articles of Association. It’s easy to select commonly-chosen terms (for example, for SEIS rounds) and we’ve added more flexibility so you can build documents that are the perfect fit for your company and your investors.

Coming soon

As usual, our team is hard at work on many different projects. Here’s a snippet of what’s coming soon:

Apply for tax credits with the RDEC scheme 💷

For companies not able to use the SME scheme to claim tax back for research and development, you’ll soon be able to apply instead via the RDEC scheme on SeedLegals.

Easily find your documents and records 🔍

Soon we’ll release a handy new search function so admin users for your company will be able to easily find any employee or document on SeedLegals.

You’ll be able to access the search function easily with the shortcut Ctrl K on Windows or ⌘ K on Mac.

Have your say

Got an idea for us? Is there something we can do better? We love to hear your feedback – good, bad and ugly. Let us know by email: [email protected]

If you aren’t already a SeedLegals member, head over to our Pricing page to find the right membership for your company.