Picture a founder who ships a working product over one long weekend. An AI coding assistant writes the boilerplate. One of the browser-based site builders that turn a prompt into a landing-page draft handles the marketing page. A third tool answers support emails. No co-founder, no payroll, no standing meetings.
Then a former colleague offers investor introductions in exchange for a small slice of the company. Sounds fair, right? Except nobody has written down who owns what.
That gap is getting more common.
The team shrank. The cap table didn’t.
Carta’s 2026 Founder Ownership Report found that about 36% of startups founded on its platform in 2025 had a solo founder, up from 31% a year earlier. Peter Walker, who runs Carta’s insights team, traced the longer arc in a February 2026 post. Solo founders made up 18% of Carta companies in 2016, and the share doubled by 2025, climbing faster after ChatGPT launched. He credits AI tools for part of it. (His own caveat: Carta only sees companies that manage equity there, so the real figure for young companies could run higher.)
Investors haven’t caught up. Walker says venture funding for solo founders still trails, hovering around 20%. Among startups that closed rounds on Carta last year, two-founder teams were the most common at 36%, and that rises to 40% in SaaS.
So starting alone has never been easier, while raising alone still looks harder. A solo founder chasing venture money often adds a co-founder, a first hire or an adviser along the way, and each one takes a bite of the same pie. Who gets what, and when?
Where the equity goes
Carta tracked rounds raised from 2021 through 2025. The numbers fall fast.
| Stage | Median founder ownership | Median employee pool |
| Seed | about 56% | 12.1% |
| Series A | 36% | not reported here |
| Series B (AI teams) | 27.3% (non-AI: 21.8%) | not reported here |
| Series C | 16.1% | 16.8% |
AI founders hang on to a bit more than everyone else at Series B. Still, by Series C the employee pool outweighs the founding team.
Run the numbers before a term sheet does
Take two founders who split 800,000 shares. One holds 480,000 (60%), the other 320,000 (40%). A year later an investor agrees to fund the company for 20% after closing. The company issues 200,000 new shares, bringing the total to 1,000,000.
Neither founder sells a single share, yet their stakes drop to 48% and 32%. That’s dilution. It doesn’t mean anyone lost money, as long as the cash grows what’s left.
The option pool is where founders get surprised. Seed investors usually want it topped up before their money lands, and the top-up falls on founders and earlier SAFE holders, not on the new investor. A bigger pool works like a lower valuation.
SAFEs stack the same way. A post-money SAFE buys roughly its amount divided by its valuation cap, so $250,000 at a $5 million cap is about 5%. Add a second one, say $500,000 at a $10 million cap, and you’ve handed over another 5% before the priced round even starts.
You can test all of this before signing anything. A free cap table template shows ownership at incorporation, after your SAFEs convert, and after a seed round, so the term sheet doesn’t get the first look at your math.
Let AI draft the questions, not the arithmetic
AI assistants are handy for decoding what a pro-rata right means or drafting questions for your lawyer. I’d keep them away from share counts. A spreadsheet formula returns the same number every time you open it, and investors will check it line by line.
A chatbot also makes a shaky witness for its own work. Research on what chatbots can report about their own internals suggests models can notice something unusual going on inside them but struggle to say what caused it. I wouldn’t treat a chatbot’s explanation as an audit trail.
Equal splits deserve the same scrutiny. Carta found that 27.3% of three-founder teams divided equity evenly last year, up from 21% the year before. Equal can work when contributions match. It shouldn’t be the default because nobody wanted the awkward conversation.
A few habits head off most of the trouble. Write down every promise, even the casual ones to advisers. Consider vesting (a four-year schedule with a one-year cliff is a common founder arrangement, though terms vary, so ask a lawyer before copying one). And update the sheet after every approved change, then check it against your signed documents.
One caveat matters. A cap table summarizes ownership. The shareholder agreement is what creates the rights and obligations, and a template is an educational model, not legal or tax advice.
When a spreadsheet stops being enough
A spreadsheet holds up with a few founders, a pool and a handful of SAFEs. Issue employee options or close a priced round, and it’s time for dedicated equity software, with your lawyer keeping the two in sync.
Until then, write it down while the whole company still fits in one tab.
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