Slice – which is the only global equity platform utilizing AI for continuous compliance – announced it has emerged from stealth with a $7 million seed funding round led by TLV Partners, with participation from R-Squared Ventures, Jibe Ventures, leading international law firms Wilson Sonsini, Fenwick & West, and notable angel investors.
Workforces have become global, and as the job market becomes more competitive, equity makes up a significant part of the talent compensation package. But issuing equity is a minefield riddled with complex and ever-changing tax laws and regulations that greatly differ from country to country, making it extremely challenging for companies to avoid compliance risks and financial penalties, which can significantly impact employee retention.
Slice’s goal is to help CFOs and companies issue and manage equity to their international employees while navigating the complexity of ever-changing regulations and tax codes across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously and at scale. And the AI-powered platform ensures that all global equity operations are compliant and tax-optimized to maximize and protect the benefits of equity plans, both for employers and employees.
Slice is the first to apply LLMs to the world of equity compliance, enabling its pre-trained platform to quickly learn and apply country-specific tax codes and regulations that impact equity awards. And actively monitoring, analyzing and implementing the latest changes across multiple countries concurrently, the end-to-end platform uniquely covers all types of employee stock options, addressing compliance and tax-code challenges to avoid the potential risk of financial penalties facing both employers and employees.
Slice was co-founded by CEO Maor Levran, CTO Aviram Berg, and CPO Yoel Amir. Levran is a lawyer repeatedly ranked as Top Tech Attorney by The Legal 500. Berg is a highly skilled data scientist, engineer and entrepreneur formally of Dataloop, and the Weizmann Institute of Science). Amiris an AI Product Management executive formerly at Salesforce, Google, and two acquired startups.
Slices’s Global Equity Assurance Platform capabilities include:
- AI-based compliance engine that continuously analyzes changes in equity regulation and taxation
- Optimizes tax for all types of equity grants, including qualified and non-qualified
- Sends pre-emptive actionable alerts to employers and employees, enabling them to steer clear of legal and tax exposure
- Provides fully customizable equity workflows that are easy to add and modify with no code, off-the-shelf templates
- Supports 23 countries, including the US, UK, France, India, Australia, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan and Brazil
- And scaling to over 100 countries by the end of the year
Slice is utilizing the funding to develop its platform further and implement go-to-market strategies across the US and Europe.
KEY QUOTES:
“Having spent 13 years as a corporate lawyer, I saw companies struggle to grant and manage equity to their international employees. I recognized the almost impossible task they faced of understanding and applying the complex and constantly changing law and tax regulations in various countries, and know of individual fines reaching well over $200K due to mistakes being made. We’ve built a co-pilot for CFOs for equity management that is capable of handling months of complex work they’d normally request from local lawyers and tax advisors in a matter of minutes. This equates to a substantial saving on time and costs, and also helps avoid distress employees may experience over potential penalties. Slice is the first equity compliance platform that empowers companies and their employees to optimize the value of global equity without fear of compliance or tax issues, a problem that nearly all companies will encounter when issuing stock options.”
– Co-founder and CEO Maor Levran
“I’ve worked for more than three decades on compensation and benefits programs with global companies so seeing Slice’s international compliance capabilities in action was thrilling. Slice simplifies the massive complexities associated with global compensation, automating an ever-changing process where the stakes for making a mistake are high. I’m so excited for what this will mean for our industry.”
– Shawn Lampron, a partner in Fenwick & West, one of America’s leading technology law firms, and co-author of “Executive Compensation for Emerging Companies”
“We were excited about Slice from day one as there’s a massive gap in the Global CFO stack around equity. It’s still extremely complicated to grant equity to international employees from a compliance and tax perspective. Existing solutions do not fully address the global complexities of equity grants. Slice is going after this precise area with a unique combination of talent and a top-notch legal, engineering, and product management team. We firmly believe they will quickly be able to deliver a new standard for global equity management and compliance.”
– Co-founder and managing partner of TLV Partners Eitan Bek
“Slice is uniquely positioned to solve a long-standing problem in the equity space and they’re poised to make a similar impact that Papaya has with payroll. For finance and HR teams dealing with equity for global teams, take a look at Slice. Their solution deals with all the nitty-gritty details surrounding legal and tax issues to save others from doing so.”
– Eynat Guez, CEO, Papaya Global and angel investor in the company
