Cap Table & Equity Dilution Calculator

A capitalisation table (cap table) is the record of who owns what in your company — founders, investors and the employee option pool. Every time you raise money or grant options, the cap table changes. Modelling it before you raise tells you how much of your company you'll actually keep.

Dilution is the reduction in your ownership percentage when new shares are issued. Your number of shares doesn't fall — the total number grows, so your slice of the whole shrinks. Two things dilute founders: selling equity to investors, and creating or topping up an ESOP pool.

Pre-money vs post-money

Pre-money is the company's value before the new investment; post-money is pre-money plus the money raised. An investor putting in 20% of the post-money company owns 20% after the round.

ESOP pool

Shares set aside for employees. Creating or expanding it issues new shares, which dilutes existing holders — usually the founders.

Each round, the new investor stake and any fresh ESOP are taken as a share of the post-money company, so every existing holder is scaled down by the same factor. Across several rounds the effect compounds.

Founder % after a round = Founder % before × (1 − new investor % − new ESOP %)

There's no fixed rule, but a common rule of thumb is to give up roughly 10–20% per priced round. After seed and Series A, many founding teams collectively hold somewhere around 40–60%, depending on round sizes and ESOP top-ups. The point isn't to avoid dilution — it's to make sure each round buys enough progress to justify the equity it costs.

1. Raise what you need, not the most you can — every extra rupee of equity funding costs ownership.
2. Raise at a higher valuation by hitting milestones first, so the same money costs less equity.
3. Negotiate when the ESOP pool is topped up — pools created pre-money dilute founders alone.
4. Use non-dilutive funding — government grants and subsidies are money you never give up equity for.

Grants are the only funding on that list that costs zero ownership. Every grant you win is runway you didn't dilute for — see which ones you qualify for from this page.

• Forgetting the ESOP pool — it dilutes founders just like investor shares do.
• Agreeing to a large pre-money ESOP top-up without realising it comes entirely out of the founders' stake.
• Over-raising early, then being heavily diluted before the company is worth much.
• Modelling only the next round instead of the full path to exit, where dilution compounds.