Easop helps you grant equity to international employees • TechCrunch

Meet Easop, a new software-as-a-service startup that helps companies manage equity incentives for employees across multiple countries. Easop works particularly well with startups that want to hire remote workers and offer them equity.

If you’re working for a tech startup and you’re in charge of hiring, you know that finding the right candidate can be quite difficult — and even more if you’re only looking for local candidates. That’s why more companies are now hiring remote workers. And the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to this trend.

It’s also easier than ever to offer a local contract with some benefits to international employees that don’t live anywhere near the company’s headquarters. Startups like Deel, Oyster and Remote let you expand your team across multiple countries without having to set up a subsidiary in each of those new countries.

And yet, that process creates a brand new set of hurdles. For instance, without a proper subsidiary, offering the same Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP) to everyone is nearly impossible.

There are some legal complexities because the regulatory framework varies from one country to another. As for employees, they have no idea how they’re supposed to file their taxes. They might not even know the value of their grant.

Easop wants to create the same experience for all employees and contractors. It connects directly to popular cap table management services like Carta and Pulley.

But Easop doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel and replace those existing solutions. It pulls equity data from those services and syncs back with Carta or Pulley when an equity event occurs in Easop.

At the same time, Easop also syncs with HR information systems like Deel, Oyster and Remote to get more information about international employees, such as their countries of residence and their start date.

When Easop clients want to make an offer to a new hire, they can draft grants in Easop and send them to the board for validation. Easop makes sure that the grant is compliant with local regulation and tax rules.

For employees down the road, they can connect to Easop’s website to check the status of their grant. And when a taxable event takes place, Easop can generate a form for annual tax reports or integrate directly with local payroll systems in some countries.

Easop has raised a $2.5 seed million round led by Partech and Boldstart Ventures. Kima Ventures, eFounders partners Thibaud Elzière and Quentin Nickmans and several business angels also participated in the round.

The idea is that Easop should work for everyone in the company — people based in the U.S. who work for the main company, people who work for a subsidiary in another country and international team members who rely on an Employer of Record (EoR) like Deel.

And I think building the same platform for everyone is the right approach. If you’re trying to build a truly distributed team, you should be able to use the same tool regardless of your location.