Cap table software is supposed to make ownership legible. This week, Pulley made the market legible instead. The company says it will shut down on December 8, 2026 and has entered an exclusive partnership to move customers to Carta, which is a fairly efficient way to announce that the cap table insurgency has ended with everyone being escorted back to the old landlord.

The public receipts are unusually blunt. Pulley's homepage now carries a shutdown notice that says it will cease all operations and services on 12/8/26, and tells existing customers to log in for an assisted migration to Carta. For prospective customers, the message is even cleaner: please visit Carta.com. The comparison page can keep its opinions, darling reader, but the banner has already called the round.

That is a sharp turn from Pulley's origin story. In 2020, TechCrunch wrote that founder Yin Wu launched the company to give founders a better cap table product, with faster onboarding, quicker 409A valuations, and tooling that treated dilution modeling like software rather than a hostage situation. Pulley went on to raise more than $50 million from investors including General Catalyst, Stripe, and Founders Fund, according to TechCrunch's shutdown report.

If you squint, the subtext is not that Carta won one feature war. It is that cap table software remains a market where trust, compliance, and workflow gravity beat product affection with ruthless consistency. Founders may say they want cleaner UX, but when a platform closes, they still need the ledger to survive the funeral. Pulley built a better alternative story. The final public notice suggests the category still clears through incumbency. There are businesses where software eats the spreadsheet. There are others where the spreadsheet simply marries the market leader and calls it maturity.