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It's Nathan.

I'm looking at the new 2026 Founder Ownership Report from Carta.

Carta tracks equity and cap tables for 50,000+ startups.

Here's a stat I can't stop thinking about:

At Series C, the median founding team owns 16.1% of their company.

The employee equity pool is 16.8%.

Founders own less of their company than the equity pool set aside for their employees.

Carta

Here's how the dilution stacks up round by round:

Seed: founders keep 56%

Series A: down to 36%

Series C: down to 16.1% (employee pool passes them at 16.8%)

Series D: down to 10.4%

By Series C, the company breaks down into three slices: founders, employees, and investors.

Except the investor slice is 4x bigger than the founder slice.

Here's why:

Every VC round does two things at once:

VCs take a chunk (usually 15-25% per round)

The employee pool gets refreshed (5-10% per round to attract new hires)

Both come out of the founders' pockets.

Four rounds in, you don't own your company anymore. Your investors do.

There's another way: non-dilutive capital.

Non-dilutive capital is any funding that doesn't take equity from your business.

You keep 100% ownership

No warrants in some options

No board seats or dilution at exit

For SaaS founders with predictable revenue, it's a smarter choice than VC.

A sneak peek of the options every SaaS founder should consider before raising:

(See full breakdown of non-dilutive funding here)

Screenshot 2026-04-28 at 4.28.38 PM

One example of how this plays out in real life:

Badger Maps, a SaaS company at $8m revenue, used non-dilutive capital twice:

First, revenue financing to fund growth