How Ledgy caters to Selina's needs by supporting growth shares

About Selina

Founded in 2019, Selina is a fintech lender based in the UK. Selina is focused on giving people flexible access to their home equity. Today, Selina has over 2,000 customers and has lent out over £200 million since its incorporation. Selina raised a £2 million seed round in 2019, a £10 million Series A in 2020, and most recently announced a £27 million Series B towards the end of 2021.

About Hubert

Hubert Fenwick is Selina’s co-founder and CEO. His responsibilities include broad firmwide and financial strategy along with investor relations and fundraising. Selina has attracted equity investment from three VC funds and business angels, and debt investments from investors including Goldman Sachs, so managing equity and stakeholder relationships is at the heart of Hubert’s work at Selina.

Unlocking equity – in British homes, and for the Selina team

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After living in the US for some years, co-founders Hubert and Leo realized that there were a number of financial products in other countries that allowed homeowners to access wealth easily. They decided to bring something similar to the UK, and have raised three funding rounds in recent years to fuel their ambitions.

Even with a fast-paced fundraising trajectory, equity soon got tricky to manage as Selina grew. Hubert started off managing equity manually with spreadsheets and different trackers, which became too complex for a growing company.

When it came to granting employees equity, Selina consulted with lawyers to help with each contract. “People would receive a single legal document with many legal terms on it, and that was that. It was time-consuming and lacked accessibility for most folks.” says Hubert. “These shares are an incentive tool, and a lot of our employees didn’t realize what that meant and how it worked: with spreadsheets, we couldn’t visualize that for them. We wanted to make equity really approachable and easy.”

Growth (shares) with Ledgy

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In the very beginning, managing Selina’s cap table through spreadsheets was feasible because of a limited number of stakeholders. But as Selina grew, Hubert realized that a more sophisticated tool was necessary to make equity management simpler.

After Selina’s Series A, Hubert started making every employee a shareholder using growth shares (also known as hurdle shares), an equity plan where employees realize the full economic benefit of their shares once the share price increases past a “hurdle rate” set by the company. Particular to the UK, hurdle shares can help to reduce the overall tax liability for employees. (More on how Ledgy handles growth shares here.) Hubert knew that from the available tools on the market, Selina would need one that catered to these specificities as a UK-based company.

Selina’s search began, and Hubert quickly landed on Ledgy: “Compared to competitors, Ledgy was very strong and catered to more of what we needed from a European and UK-centric angle – like working with growth shares that are quite specific to the UK.”

Simplicity is key

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Today, Selina manages around 80 stakeholders on Ledgy. Since joining forces with Ledgy in late 2021, Hubert has led his team through a Series B financing round which was aided by Ledgy’s scenario modeling, and which they were able to share with their employees through their dashboard.

Since using Ledgy for their Series B, Hubert has found that keeping Selina’s data clear and up to date has been easy, and communication with stakeholders has been facilitated by inviting them directly to Ledgy. “Whenever there are any new transactions, I know that Ledgy is my single source of truth, whereas before I had three or four spreadsheets that didn’t necessarily always match reality. It’s very powerful.” he says.

In addition, Ledgy has helped with the visualization and engagement Selina’s team has with their equity. “It does a simple job extremely well. It’s easy to understand, easy to access, and people can play around on their dashboard with scenarios which is really cool. We’ve only received positive feedback from the team.” says Hubert. He is also looking forward to the possible efficiencies that come from using Ledgy to manage employee equity and documentation. “At our next issuance - which is when I will be using Ledgy’s document automation for the first time, it will probably save me up to 50% of the time the whole process would take otherwise.”

What’s next for Selina?

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Selina continues to focus on helping UK homeowners upgrade their lifestyle using the wealth they have in their homes. In the next few years, Hubert hopes to welcome new investors on board to help Selina accelerate its mission while managing financing and engaging employees with Ledgy! Read more stories about Ledgy’s customers here.

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