Allow your company to issue conditional growth shares on Vestd.
The easiest way to add Vestd’s growth share clauses to your Articles – and allow your company to issue conditional growth shares – is to adopt the Vestd Articles of Association.
However, we understand that every business is different, and if you don’t want to adopt our Articles in full, or have custom Articles, you can still adopt the specific growth share clauses.
During your onboarding, we’ll ask whether you want to adopt our Articles or add the specific growth share clauses to your existing Articles.
But if you’ve already joined the platform and want to be able to issue growth shares, please contact us so we can send you a document of the specific clauses to be added to your existing Articles.
We strongly recommend you pass this document on to your lawyers to review the new clauses and whether they impact any existing clauses in your current Articles. Then they should draft them in.
How to incorporate a company with Vestd's growth share clauses
If you're incorporating a company through Vestd, you can either adopt the Vestd Articles of Association or have your lawyers add the appropriate Vestd growth shares clauses to your existing Articles.
If your lawyers add the Vestd growth share clauses, please ensure they call the growth shares V/Vn shares for them to work on the platform.
Please email us at support@vestd.com to request the growth share clauses, then your lawyers will need to make sure they fit into your company's Articles of Association without any conflicts.
Do my lawyers need to create any additional agreements?
No! The good news is that once you have the appropriate Articles, Vestd eliminates the admin-heavy process of distributing conditional growth shares, and you don’t have to pay for any additional legal agreements or documents.
When a recipient accepts their growth share distribution, the Vestd platform digitally captures and creates a legally binding “Task Agreement.”
The Task Agreement is the digital contractual agreement between the company and the recipient which is attached to the growth share distribution. The "Task" explains what the recipient needs to do to remove the conditionality from — and therefore keep — the shares.
The Task Agreement also replaces the need for a Share Subscription Agreement, as the obligations and conditions within it create a legally binding contract between the two parties.
It’s worth noting that as the Task Agreement legally binds both parties at the point of acceptance, any additional documents could conflict with this agreement. So if you (or your lawyers) want to use bespoke agreements for growth share distributions, they won’t be compatible with the Vestd platform and will have to be managed off-platform.
We have set it up this way to completely digitise growth share distributions for both parties. But more importantly, so you don’t have to pay lawyers for any additional agreements.
Once your lawyers are happy there are no conflicts between your existing Articles and our growth share clauses, you will need to pass a directors’ and special shareholders’ resolution to authorise the adoption of the new Articles.
You can use Vestd’s bespoke resolutions feature to generate the resolutions and send them to the relevant parties to sign. Once approved, we’ll automatically update Companies House with your new Articles.
Now your Articles are in place, the next step is to get a hurdle valuation and authorise a growth share pool.
Our team, content and app can help you make informed decisions. However, any guidance and support should not be considered as 'legal, tax or financial advice.'