For founders and the people who lead their SPVs • $10/month per SPV • Investor accounts are free • Not a formation service
The founder's problem
Friends, operators, and customers who believe in you write $5K to $25K checks. Say yes to all of them individually and you inherit thirty signature blocks, thirty entries for your next lead to diligence, thirty people emailing you for updates, and a data room that looks busier than your company. Most founders know the fix is an SPV. Then someone has to actually run it.
The fix
Your attorney (or a formation platform) sets up an LLC. Your small checks buy percentages of the SPV, and the SPV invests in your round as a single entity. One signature, one line on the cap table.
An investor manages the vehicle (best practice: not the founder). They record funding, issues pro-rata capital calls with emailed notices, imports bank history, and shares documents like K-1s privately with each member.
Every member gets a free Pinion account showing their share: contributions, value, distributions, calls outstanding, documents. Your update goes to one entity; their dashboards do the rest.
What the manager sees
The Members view is the SPV's cap table in motion: ownership, committed capital, contributions and distributions per member, who has linked their account, and who still owes on the last call. This is the page that replaces the spreadsheet only one person understands.
Pricing
SPV platforms charge thousands per vehicle because they also form and administer it. If your round just needs the aggregation and the record-keeping, Friendly SPV runs the ledger for $10/month per SPV on a Pinion paid plan, with unlimited members and free investor accounts. The full feature tour is here.
Yes, and it happens in most competitive early rounds. A group of small checks invests through a special purpose vehicle (usually an LLC), the SPV signs your round documents as a single investor, and each person owns their percentage of the SPV. The vehicle needs a manager, and best practice is that the manager comes from the investor side, not from the company (more on that below). Securities rules apply to pooling investors, so have counsel bless the structure before money moves.
An investor should. The manager acts for the SPV's members: they call capital, hold the records, and represent the group's interests, including in situations where those interests diverge from the company's. A founder managing their own investors' vehicle is a conflict of interest that sophisticated leads will flag in diligence, and it puts you on both sides of every hard conversation. The natural pick is your largest or most engaged angel; the job is light enough with good tooling that most say yes. Your part is simple: suggest the structure, introduce the group, and stay off the vehicle's paperwork.
No. Friendly SPV is the record-keeping and investor-communication layer (a ledger, not full accounting software) and not a formation service. Your attorney or a platform forms the entity; Friendly SPV then keeps its ledger, splits capital calls pro-rata with emailed notices, shares documents like K-1s privately with the right member, and gives every investor a free account showing exactly what their slice is worth.
One entry: the SPV. One signature block on your documents, one stakeholder to send updates to, one line for your Series A lead to diligence. The individual investors hold their stakes inside the SPV, invisible to your cap table and your data room.
A free Pinion account with a position showing their pro-rata share of the SPV: contributions, current value, distributions, capital calls with what they've funded, and the documents shared with them. They stop emailing you for updates because the answer is on their dashboard.
The SPV's manager pays $10 a month per SPV on a Pinion Family ($4.95/mo) or Team ($19.95/mo) plan. Unlimited members, and member accounts are free. There is no percentage of the raise, no carry, and no per-investor fee.