OPTION
POOL
DATA
JULY 2021
Option pool data: July 2021
1
Executive summary
In 2018, Index Ventures published Rewarding Talent, a report
on using equity to reward employees at startups. It was based
largely on data from its portfolio of 73 companies.
Three years on, Capdesk presents data gathered from 140
customers who granted us permission to anonymise and share
data regarding their option pools. We found the average option
pool size is significantly higher than the 10% reported in Index
Ventures’ study.
All companies who contributed data to this report are either
headquartered, or have the majority of their workforces, in
the UK and Europe.
We hope this report will be a useful benchmark for founders
and equity practitioners of all kinds to justify and leverage
employee share schemes.
Methodology
Option pool data per company was calculated based on the
percentage marked as part of the option pool, as a portion of
the fully diluted equity on our platform.
All other data, such as number of employees, latest funding round,
total funding amount and last funding data, was sourced from
Crunchbase.
To simplify categorisation, the industries pulled from Crunchbase
were bucketed as follows:
1. Mobility tech
2. Retail tech
3. Ad/martech
4. Deeptech
5. HR/rec tech
6. Health and bio tech
7. Green tech
8. Fintech
9. SaaS and General IT
10. Ed tech
11. Proptech
12. Gaming
OPTION
POOL
DATA JULY 2021
Option pool data: July 2021
2
● Option pool sizes are significantly larger than the 10%
reported by Index Ventures. An average of 17.3% (median
19.9%) of the fully diluted equity was found to be dedicated
to employee option pools. We believe this represents:
a. an evolution of the market, moving in line with
the example set by American startups
b. a significant departure from popular belief –
Index Ventures’ 10% figure is often referenced
by media outlets and other businesses, such as
Sifted and Seedlegals.
● A company’s number of employees (grouped as 1-10