What is a cap table?

It's usually used for private companies, especially VC-backed startups with many different investors and rounds of investments.

It shows you how much each investor owns in the company, and what types of securities they own - common stock, preferred stock, options, warrants, etc.

In banking and PE, it is most often used in a Flow of Funds model to show how much each investor / owner would earn if the company were sold for a certain amount.

So a typical cap table might consist of:

-List of employees with the amount of common stock and options (along with the strike prices for the options) they each own.

-List of investors and the securities they own, whether it's preferred stock, common stock, options, warrants, or other less common types. Again, the key data is the quantity and then the exercise price (for options/warrants).

Cap tables can get quite complicated depending on the company, but those are the basics.

Usually you would use a cap table to establish a per-share purchase price for the company, and then plug that data into the table to calculate how much each entity that owns part of the company would earn in a sale.