How Alaan used Carta to turn employees into real owners

When you’re growing at 15% month-over-month, manual processes become a liability. For Dubai-based fintech startup Alaan, scaling meant building out new teams and issuing employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) to new hires in multiple regions.

"Before Carta, ESOPs were just something you saw on your offer letter,” says Shubhda Hirawat, Alaan’s Chief of Staff. “Employees didn’t have a real sense of how much they owned, how much was vested and we knew we needed to make it feel more real."

When Shubhda joined Alaan in early 2024, she figured that giving employees a clear view of their equity was crucial to helping them to truly understand what it means to own a slice of the company they are helping to build.

From skepticism to shared ownership

Though Alaan’s leadership was already using Carta’s platform to manage their cap table, ESOP allocation was not a common practice in the regions that they operate in. In India especially, Shubhda shared that employees were skeptical about ESOPs because startups there often struggled to implement them correctly. 

Using Carta’s platform changed that. "We had a call with a Carta representative where she walked us through the platform, answered all our questions, and made sure we knew exactly how to use the tools," she said. "Our employees were impressed with how easy and user-friendly it was."

Alaan began issuing ESOPs to new employees after their probation period, and for the first time, employees were able to log in to their personal Carta accounts and see their equity vest in real time.

The feedback was immediate and positive. Employees who were skeptical about ESOPs in a region where it was not a common practice suddenly had a tangible way to view their equity.

"It’s a cool feeling, when people who truly understand equity, actually get to see their shares vest every day," Shubhda said. "It grants a lot of visibility to people, which they appreciate. I got to see my options vest, too, and it was a great experience."

The power of data-driven growth

Following success in India and the UAE, Alaan recently raised a $48 million Series A, fuelling their expansion into new markets like Saudi Arabia. With the Saudi market being significantly larger than the UAE market, this growth presents an opportunity for a huge number of ESOPs to be issued to new employees.

"It’s easy to do it on spreadsheets when you have a team of 10 to 15. But as you grow and hire more people globally, your cap table and ESOP gets more and more complicated," said Shubhda. 

For a company scaling this quickly, managing equity with spreadsheets is not a sustainable option. But now with Carta, getting visibility of Alaan’s ESOP allocation has never been easier. "Every quarter, I can just simply download a report of the ESOPs with the click of a button," Shubhda said.

Beyond managing ESOPs, Carta has also supported Alaan in strategic planning. Alaan utilized the Carta platform for scenario modelling to analyze ownership impact by comparing complex scenarios. By using Carta’s scenario modelling tool, Alaan is able to quickly generate detailed waterfall models, from breakpoint analysis to payout modelling by share class, as well as model multiple rounds at once to see how each new funding scenario will affect the company’s ownership.

This data-driven approach allowed Alaan’s leadership to make informed decisions and maintain a clean, organized cap table, which was a crucial advantage as they prepared for their fundraising round.

At the time of our interview with Shubhda, Alaan had achieved a remarkable 92.99% utilization of its ESOPs on the Carta platform. This is a powerful testament to the company’s mission of making every employee an owner, and a clear sign that Carta is not just a tool, but a foundation that helps startups like Alaan turn their mission of creating owners into a tangible reality.