Ledgy helps Yeply scale and empower stakeholders

About Yeply

Yeply was founded in 2016 to “bring bicycle maintenance to customers, wherever they might be.” Yeply’s mission is to become the main provider of modern bicycle maintenance services across Europe and beyond. Having previously raised a pre-seed crowdfunding round in 2019, Yeply raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Inventure in 2022.

About Antti

Antti Känsälä is Yeply’s CEO and co-founder. He previously worked as the managing director of an IT services startup before his passion for cycling brought him to found Yeply with his childhood friend, Tommi Särkkinen. As CEO, Antti has traditionally worn many hats at Yeply, taking ownership of functions from product to finance.

From two guys in a van to a rapidly expanding business: Yeply’s growth story

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Antti and his co-founder Tommi started Yeply because they saw huge flaws in the way bike maintenance was delivered. To learn more about people’s expectations, and to create a service that delighted customers, the two drove around in a van to understand how the bike maintenance model worked, exploring how best to reinvent the experience for people.

Even in these early stages of Yeply’s growth, Antti had big expansion plans in mind. He knew that “to create a great company, you need to attract great investors and great team members to help you grow.” He started by running a crowdfunding campaign in 2019 that brought some initial angel investors on board. The crowdfunding provider recommended another equity tool to Antti, which he later used to organize Yeply’s seed fundraising.

However, as Antti began speaking to institutional investors during Yeply’s seed funding round, he realized that he needed a richer tool to handle due diligence.

“After that funding round, I decided that going forward, I wanted an equity management tool where I really trusted that everything would be 100% reliable and that I would have a real single source of truth for equity data.”

Landing on Ledgy

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After his fundraising experience, Antti decided to go to his peers for advice, tapping into his network to ask about other founders’ experience with equity management tools.

“80% of the founders I spoke to had a clear answer: Ledgy. The consensus was that for a company expanding from the Nordics out across Europe, Ledgy was by far the best option to manage our equity and share ownership.”

Ledgy’s flexibility in managing crowdfunded shareholders made a big difference to Antti. “We needed to find a more cost-effective way of managing many ‘inactive’ shareholders on our cap table, and Ledgy helped us do this in a really convenient way.”

Saving time and streamlining admin

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Today, Yeply manages more than 300 different stakeholders with Ledgy. This would ordinarily create a significant amount of admin for the owner of the equity plan, but being able to create templates for repetitive processes and automate workflows for document signatures reduces the amount of time Antti has to spend on equity admin every month.

And, of course, Ledgy’s customer service has made a difference too. “What I love about Ledgy is that from the first day, throughout the onboarding up to now, your team has been super helpful,” Antti says. “Compared to many other companies, it really feels like Ledgy genuinely cares about their customers.”

The element that brings Antti the most satisfaction, though, is his knowledge that Yeply has a single source of truth for managing an increasingly complicated ESOP plan. “When I need to access a piece of data, I know exactly where to find it, I know that it’s correct, and I know that what I see is the same as what the employee or investor sees. That’s where the real power is.”

What the future holds for Yeply

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Yeply now operates Europe-wide, with ambitions of being a global business in the next three to five years. Keeping the team happy and motivated through this growth period is essential, and that means supporting shareholders and optionholders with their equity stakes. “We believe that if the company is doing well, then the team should be doing well too,” says Antti. We can’t wait to see where Yeply’s growth takes them next!

Read more stories from Ledgy's customers here.