When we invested in Vauban, they were scraping by. I won’t bore you with the whole story, but you should read about them here. They were acquired by Carta, and now I am a Carta shareholder.
However, Vauban is still innovating like crazy and trying to press the envelope to grow revenue.
Today, they announced something pretty cool, Migrate. If you have an SPV and want to transition it to the Carta platform, you can do that simply and easily with Vauban’s new product.
Migrate is automatic. Here are some features and benefits I lifted off the page.
Lossless migration
We take care of the migration of your Master LLC & Series LLC vehicles and offer full administrative services.
Security and stability
Securely transfer all of your SPV and investor data to Vauban. We’ll never monetize your data or market investments to your LPs.
Provide continuity and stability for your investors with the knowledge that we'll be here to support you until your exit.
Full administration
Receive full-scope admin services including 1065, K1s, and disbursements on exit.
What deals can we administer?
Single asset deals that have invested in C-corps. We’ll file the extension if needed so all tax returns are done on time.
Back in the day when I started Hyde Park Angels, we set up each investment as an SPV and we charged an extra 3% on top of the investment to manage all the accounting and legal expenses for the life of the investment. We found 3% was a little light so we started charging 5%. That way the entrepreneur wouldn’t have to pay for it at closing and they only had one line on the capitalization table instead of a bunch of names.
By the way, if you are an entrepreneur that has scads of names on your cap table, I’d highly recommend going to Vauban and rolling them all into an SPV that you are the manager of. All financial reporting will be automatic. All you have to worry about is communicating with them about how your business is doing.
If you run an accelerator or an angel group you should be using Vauban. It will make your operations smoother.
Unfortunately for me, I once used a competitor to Vauban because they weren’t in the US yet. Vauban is in the US now. I had a terrible time with the competitor’s technology. It was a horrible experience for me, and my LPs in the SPV. The competitor really made me look bad.
This is one hell of a product offering... I have uses for this. I’m the CFO of a family office that is moving slowly to handing off to the 3rd gen. There are Four brothers as shareholders of the c corp now, and many of the outside entities are set up just as you mention here. When the next gen comes, it will be 16 names. I want this before that happens.
Your friend Terry Duffy was on Tucker Carlson tonight around 8:23.