You have decided to give equity. Now comes the hard part: who gets how much.
The ESOP Allocation Calculator turns a decision most founders make on gut feel into a framework you can defend to your board, your co-founders and the employees themselves. Score each person on the same 20 factors, and see exactly how your pool splits before anyone sees a number.
- Behavioural evidence: the reasoning recorded against each of the 20 factors.
- Pool analysis: how much is allocated, how much is reserved, and where the concentration risk sits.
Built for the people who actually make this call.
Founders and promoters
You are giving away a slice of the company you built. You want it to land with the right people and to hold up when someone asks why. The tool gives you both.
CFOs and finance heads
You have to model the dilution and defend the logic to the board. You get a clean allocation, a pool view, and a report you can drop straight into your own workings.
HR and compensation leads
You run the assessment conversations. A shared 20-factor rubric means every manager is scoring against the same bar, not their own gut feel.
Boards and investors
You need to know a grant was earned, not guessed. Every recommendation comes with the score, the peer comparison and the pool maths behind it.
Designed for Indian manufacturing SMEs and mid-market companies. Backed by Dev Mantra's corporate advisory practice.
Splitting the pool is where good intentions turn into a political problem.
Deciding to share ownership is the easy part. The hard part starts the moment you open the spreadsheet and try to put a number next to each name — your longest-serving plant manager or the engineer who redesigned the line last year, the loyal head of accounts or the sales lead who actually moves revenue. Give too much to the wrong people and you cannot fix it later. Give too little to the ones you cannot afford to lose, and they find out what the market pays.
Most companies solve this with a spreadsheet, a gut feel and a hope that nobody compares notes. The ESOP Allocation Calculator replaces that with a documented, repeatable framework — the same one behind Dev Mantra's ESOP Allocation Model.
From a blank pool to a board-ready allocation in five steps.
The calculator walks you through the same sequence a good advisor would. You move forward only when each step is complete.
Set up the pool.
Enter your company details and the total ESOP pool you are allocating. Set aside a reserve for future hires (the tool defaults to 10%), and it shows you exactly how much is available to grant now.
Add your people.
Register every employee you are considering: name, designation, department, seniority level, and years with the company. Manufacturing departments and roles are built in, from Production and Quality Control to R&D and Finance.
Score the behaviour.
Answer 20 short, plain-English statements per employee — the same evidence your HR and finance teams would use to justify a number to the board, one question per screen.
Review the pool split.
See exactly how the pool divides across everyone scored, how much stays reserved, and whether any seniority tier is over-committed — before anyone sees a number.
Export the report.
Download a boardroom-ready PDF with the full audit trail, or keep the emailed copy for your own records. This is the document you put in front of your compensation committee and board.
Twenty factors, because "he's been here a long time" is not a framework.
Tenure matters, but it is one input, not the answer. The calculator scores each employee from 0–5 across twenty factors covering ownership mindset, problem-solving, leadership, retention importance, replacement difficulty and more — for a total out of 100. Every score is backed by a specific, plain-English statement, so the reasoning is on record, not just the number.
Stop guessing who gets what.
Set up your pool, add your people, and get a defensible allocation you can put in front of your board today — free.
Launch the calculator