VC

🧩 Convertible Complexity in Venture: A Comparative Analysis of Aumni and Carta

🎯 Executive Summary

In today’s venture capital landscape, convertible instruments such as SAFEs and Convertible Notes have become the dominant vehicles for early-stage fundraising and bridge financing. Their flexibility and speed make them attractive, but they come at a cost: opacity. Unlike priced equity rounds, convertibles are often governed by legal agreements that lack standardisation, making it difficult for investors to evaluate risk, track ownership, or benchmark deal terms.

Aumni solves this problem by transforming complex legal documents into structured data — empowering investors with insight into the terms that define their portfolios. This case study examines how Aumni helps decode the chaos of convertible instruments, supported by scraped Twitter/X commentary and hard data from its 2024 and Q1 2025 Venture Beacon reports.

What the Tweets Say: Real Investors, Real Signals

To better understand how Aumni is perceived in the VC community, I scraped public tweets using RapidAPI's Twitter API (free, but limited) and a custom Python script. I filtered for mentions of Aumni, Carta, Tactyc, Visible.vc, and Serif — with Aumni and Carta receiving the vast majority of attention.

Each tweet was analysed using OpenAI’s API for sentiment and content themes (e.g., market insights, product praise, legal interpretation). I then categorised the results in Excel and compared them to insights from the Beacon Venture reports.

You can get the Excel file of the raw tweets (with partial sentiment classification) >>here<<.

In a market growing more complex — with down rounds, bridge SAFEs, and hybrid structures — tweets about Aumni centred on decoding that legal and structural complexity. Carta, by contrast, was often discussed in the context of interface issues, valuation tools, or company announcements.

Note: Most tweet references predate 2025 due to API limitations.

Venture Beacon Report: The VC Market Is Recovering — But Getting Harder to Read

Recent years have seen a spike in bridge rounds, SAFEs, and convertible notes, especially during downturn periods like 2023–2024. These instruments introduce ambiguous valuation mechanics (e.g. valuation caps, discounts, interest rates), making ownership forecasting and portfolio modelling extremely difficult.

This is not just a startup problem — it's a venture portfolio management risk.

The VC Market Is Recovering — But Getting Harder to Read

Convertible rounds often defer or obscure key decisions:

• When exactly does the SAFE convert?
• Into what class of shares?
• At what implied price, especially if cap tables are outdated or inaccurate?

From the 2024 Venture Beacon Report:

• Convertible cap sizes rose by 6%–30%, while check sizes declined up to 27%
• Time-to-conversion now exceeds the six-year average by 4–5 months
• Pay-to-play provisions and liquidation seniority terms increased in late-stage deals

And in the Q1 2025 report:

• 81% of SAFEs used valuation caps without discounts — up from 67% in 2021
• Down rounds hit 21%, the highest ever
• Extension rounds are up 28% compared to 23% in Q4 2024

Even in a rebounding market, term complexity and delayed conversions remain major investor risks

This kind of nuance creates enormous difficulty in:

• Modelling dilution across future rounds
• Ensuring pro-rata rights are respected
• Reporting to LPs or auditors

How Aumni Turns Legal Chaos Into Structured Intelligence

Aumni sits at the intersection of legal documents and structured data. Its platform scans executed agreements and parses:

• Valuation cap details
• Discount terms
• Convertible note interest rates
• SAFE conversion triggers

Platform features include:

• 🔎 Legal data ingestion from executed docs
• 📊 Modelling of equity conversion scenarios
• 🧠 Market benchmarking on deal terms
• 🧾 Reporting aligned with LP and compliance expectations

Carta vs. Aumni: Tracking Equity vs. Understanding It

While Carta received a lot of praise for cap table management on twitter, it does not interpret legal documents or extract specific clauses from executed agreements. Its tools help founders and VCs track ownership, model rounds, and aggregate high-level SAFE/convertible trends — but not parse legal nuance.

Praising Carta's cap tables:

Pointing out Carta's limitations in document management:

By contrast, Aumni provides the “legal truth layer” — extracting MFN clauses, SAFE variants, cap and discount logic, and side letters directly from signed documents.

In a world where ownership and valuation math are increasingly murky, Aumni becomes the source of truth for legal and financial terms.

Why Aumni Is Becoming a Core Infrastructure Layer

Rather than competing head-on with Carta’s cap table software, Aumni focuses on the "ground truth" — what investors actually signed. Its platform gives firms the ability to assess terms, benchmark against market standards, and simulate outcomes across convertible instruments.

From fund associates to general partners, Aumni helps decision-makers move faster with better information — not just to close deals, but to shape them.

Final Thought: Legal Data Wins in a Complex Market

This isn’t just legal tech — it’s decision infrastructure. In a chaotic funding environment, Aumni gives VCs clarity, confidence, and context. Their real-time analysis of convertible deal terms not only de-risks investment strategies but helps position JP Morgan as a credible, data-driven partner in the venture ecosystem.