Pulley Shuts Down After 7 Years, Hands Users to Carta

Pulley, a cap table management startup built to challenge Carta, is shutting down Dec. 8, 2026, according to a notice posted on its website that TechCrunch reported Sept. 16. The company raised more than $50 million since founding in 2020, and it is directing both current and prospective customers to the rival it spent seven years trying to unseat.

Pulley's own site states customers have until the Dec. 8 cutoff to migrate and keep their existing pricing for a year, with credit for any unused subscription time. New prospects are told to sign up with Carta directly. Founder and Chief Executive Yin Wu wrote in a LinkedIn post that "though this is the closing of one chapter, I, along with many of our strongest team members, have no intention of riding off quietly into the night," without naming a next venture.

What $50 million bought against a company worth $8.5 billion

Pulley's investors included General Catalyst, Stripe and Founders Fund, according to TechCrunch's report. Wu is a four-time founder; one earlier company, the computer-vision startup Double Labs, was acquired by Microsoft, where she worked as a software engineer for two years before starting Pulley.

The company never disclosed a valuation of its own, and neither the shutdown notice nor TechCrunch's report gives one. Carta, the market leader Pulley was chasing, has: a 2022 secondary sale priced it at $8.5 billion, and by 2024 it was working toward a secondary sale targeting as little as $2 billion, after Carta chief executive Henry Ward said on Medium the company would exit its secondary-trading business over trust concerns about how it used cap table data.

Company	Metric	Figure
Pulley	Total funding raised, 2020-2026	More than $50 million
Carta	Peak valuation (2022 secondary sale)	$8.5 billion
Carta	Target valuation (2024 secondary sale)	As low as $2 billion

The gap the funding numbers do not explain

Neither company's numbers explain why Pulley lost. Carta itself lost roughly three-quarters of its peak valuation over the same stretch Pulley was raising and spending its $50 million, so the incumbent was also wounded, not dominant by execution alone. Pulley's shutdown notice gives no financial reason, and TechCrunch's report notes the company did not offer one either.

The venture market that funded Pulley has not gone quiet: the same week Pulley's shutdown became public, women's-health startup Evvy closed a $40 million Series B and Matter Venture Partners closed a $450 million second fund. Capital was still moving into unproven categories at the same moment a seven-year-old, venture-backed incumbent challenger folded, which is the detail that undercuts any read of this as a funding drought rather than a specific product failing to unseat a specific competitor.

What happens to the data now

Pulley's notice does not say what happens to a customer's cap table data if that customer does not act before Dec. 8, only that Carta migration is the path it is offering. It also does not disclose how many customers it had at shutdown, a number that would show how much of the market Carta's fallen valuation still represents next to a challenger's exit.