Source Code Capital portfolio company YiCan announced the completion of a multi-million-dollar Pre-A funding round, with existing investor Source Code Capital continuing to increase its stake.

源码资本·May 12, 2020·1·3

The company serves nearly 1,000 clients, with 70% being post-Series A companies or those generating annual revenue exceeding RMB 20 million.

Primary-market equity services provider YiCan announced the completion of a multi-million-dollar Pre-A funding round, led by Shunwei Capital with participation from existing angel investor Source Code Capital. Following this round, YiCan plans to roll out additional service modules to help clients manage their equity.

About YiCan

Founded in late 2017, YiCan is a primary-market equity services provider specializing in equity structuring and incentive plan consulting. It closes the loop through a proprietary equity SaaS product. Its mission is to build industry-standard solutions using data and algorithms, helping client companies use equity to attract, retain, and filter talent while increasing equity liquidity.

In the United States, third-party equity services is already a mature industry. YiCan's benchmark, Carta — the largest equity management and trading platform in the U.S. primary market — completed a $300 million Series E in 2019 at a $1.7 billion valuation. It now serves 14,000 enterprise clients and manages hundreds of billions in equity assets.

Product and User Relationship

Equity structuring emerged as commercial society became increasingly specialized; for the past two decades, it was handled by law firms or consulting companies. But traditional service models relied too heavily on individual experience, lacked data accumulation, dragged on for extended periods, and charged premium prices — meaning only a small subset of mature companies could afford them.

YiCan deconstructs the knowledge, techniques, and workflows of equity services, augmenting them with industry data and algorithms so that companies at every stage and of every type can access cutting-edge products and professional expertise at low cost and high efficiency.

As a legal-tech startup, YiCan chose to transform the equity space because it identified two pain points companies face in equity management:

When companies try to use equity incentives to unite teams and attract talent, they often fall short due to unpredictable risks, poor execution, information opacity, and high communication costs.
In the process of designing and issuing equity, company management needs industry data and expert experience to help formulate or validate the rationality of decisions.

To address the first pain point, YiCan launched its SaaS product "YiCan inX Equity Management System" in July 2018, covering the full startup lifecycle and all aspects of equity management. For the second pain point, it rolled out a BI algorithmic recommendation system in July 2019, using industry data and algorithmic recommendations to provide data guidance and decision support for management when designing plans.

inX System — Overview Page

Competitive Edge and Product Differentiation

Founder & CEO Yiran Huang believes YiCan's competitive advantage is its productization capability. The product maintains a rapid iteration cadence — minor releases every two weeks, major releases every quarter — and currently meets the needs of most companies from startup stage through Pre-IPO. With industry data, algorithmic recommendations, and full-lifecycle equity management, YiCan no longer depends on individual consultants' experience or ties up in-house HR bandwidth.

The prerequisite for this service model is the iterative integration of systems and consulting. The result is more evidence-based, precise solutions while improving YiCan's own service efficiency. Currently, YiCan's solutions average 1.7 versions (meaning most clients finalize within two drafts), and a single consultant can handle 50–100 projects per year.

In terms of product differentiation, YiCan positions itself not as an equity incentive tool but as a full-lifecycle equity management system. Beyond the closed-loop processes of issuance, vesting, exercise, and repurchase, the inX system mirrors the company's entire cap table. Through differentiated permission settings, it helps management and execution layers build comprehensive understanding of equity structure, guides stakeholders in decision-making, and — once equity assets accumulate to sufficient scale — captures companies' trading needs in real time to provide liquidity services. Since equity allocation is itself part of a company's long-term incentive system, and equity changes involve financial cost recognition and tax burden, YiCan also plans to expand into HR SaaS and fintech SaaS scenarios.

inX System — Cap Table Page

For its consulting team, YiCan chose to build an in-house operation to ensure quality control and achieve integration of product and service. Yiran Huang believes that while outsourcing can reduce costs, the downsides are obvious: uneven service quality on one hand, and user data leaking externally on the other — leading to smaller data volumes, fewer data dimensions, inability to deeply mine user needs, and slower product iteration.

To address the cost implications of the in-house model, YiCan productized standardized equity consulting services by launching a service middleware system. YiCan's consultants use standardized calculation models in the system to generate service proposals more efficiently, improving per-capita productivity by 500% and achieving recommendation accuracy three times the industry average. Clients also receive more visualized, standardized deliverables, improving satisfaction.

Consulting Deliverable Demo

With the most standardized system and richest data, YiCan launched its equity BI big data system in 2019 to recommend incentive plans that meet industry standards. On one hand, intelligent recommendations solve the long-standing questions that have plagued business owners: "to whom," "how much," and "how to grant." On the other hand, frontline departments (pre-sales, consulting) can operate on the system, using data to move beyond traditional consulting's dependence on experience, continuously mining user needs to provide value-added services and enabling recurring revenue.

Client Data

YiCan currently serves nearly 1,000 clients. In 2019, client count tripled compared to 2018, revenue quadrupled, and the company maintained sustained profitability.

Clients at Series A or later, or with annual revenue exceeding RMB 20 million, account for 70%. Key accounts include Meishubao, Yijiupi, Zhenkunhang, Ruigu, Baibu, Laoqin, Zhongmeng, Wisdom Map, ZhiZhangYi, Immuncus, Kuaidian Reading, Huishoubao, Insnail, Sumscope, CassTime, Shumei, Shanyan, Sanjieke, Baozhunniu, and Zhijia.

For client expansion, the company plans to broaden beyond its current new-economy base into traditional industries. It also plans to open East China and South China branches to serve regional clients locally.