Concept-of-the-week
Stock Appreciation Rights (SARs)
Stock Appreciation Rights (SARs) give employees the economic benefit of equity ownership without requiring the company to issue shares.
An employee granted 10,000 SARs at a $10 grant price per SAR pays nothing upfront. If the company’s stock later rises to $40, the employee receives $300,000, representing the $30 increase in value multiplied by 10,000 SARs. That appreciation can be settled in cash or stock; the employee receives only the increase above the $10 grant price.
How that appreciation is settled determines the accounting and the company’s exposure. Cash-settled SARs are recorded as a liability and remeasured at each reporting date, so a rising share price increases the liability and reduces reported earnings. Stock-settled SARs, by contrast, are recorded as equity and do not create the same earnings volatility from remeasurement.
What we’re watching
Tenstorrent raises $1.5B Series E at a $6.2B valuation
AI chip company Tenstorrent closed a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation. The company chose fresh funding over a sale after holding takeover talks with Intel and Qualcomm earlier in the year.
The new valuation more than doubles the approximately $2.6 billion valuation Tenstorrent commanded at its nearly $700 million Series D in late 2024. The company plans to use the capital to fund volume manufacturing of its Galaxy servers, develop next-generation hardware, and expand hiring.
Source: Dealroom
Community Office Hours
Join our next Office Hours on walkthrough on Managing Cap Table on EquityList
Your cap table is the foundation of every equity decision your company makes. It shows who owns what, across every share class and instrument, and it needs to stay accurate every time ownership changes. Between multiple share classes, transfers, and option exercises, keeping it up to date gets complicated fast.
In this Office Hours session, we’re breaking it all down. We’ll walk you through setting up your cap table on EquityList, configuring share classes and instruments, transfers. We’ll also answer your questions live. Whether you’re setting up a cap table for the first time or managing one across multiple funding rounds, this session will help you keep it clean, accurate, and audit-ready.
November 05 | Friday | 3 PM IST
This week’s highlights
Eka Robotics raised $150M Series A at $1.45B led by a16z and F-Prime (Source)
Chai Discovery raised $400M Series C (Source)
General Compute raised $100M Series A led by Blackbird and Abstract Ventures (Source)
Infisical raised $40M Series B at $600M valuation led by Elad Gil, YC and Gradient Ventures(Source)
Re:Build Manufacturing raised $2.1B led by General Catalyst and JPMorganChase (Source)
See you next week,
Team EquityList
