We create financial products that give everyone who owns startup equity (founders, the teams who build with them, and the GPs who back them) faster liquidity, downside protection, and institutional-grade wealth creation, years before a traditional exit. Together, these products let everyone with a stake in a startup swing bigger, hit harder, and perform better.
Whether you founded the company, joined it, or backed it, every product exists to do one thing: make you perform better, by taking the personal downside off the table, accelerating your liquidity, and amplifying your upside so you can swing bigger.
The three products below are three ways into one mutual pool. Seed founders bring the upside; employees at Series B to E companies and GPs' carry in late-stage winners bring the steadiness: fewer failures, earlier exits, premiums on schedule.
Blended, the pool needs about a third of the worst-case cash it would need run as three separate pools, and it grows larger than the three would apart.
How the pool works →The world's first mutual insurance pool for founder equity. You insure up to 10% of the equity in your startup for a flat annual premium of $5K per $1M insured. If your company fails, you receive a contractual cash payout of $500K per $1M insured, over three to five years.
And because it's a mutual pool, you're not a customer, you're an owner: every insured founder holds dividend shares in the whole pool, every founder, employee and GP we insure, paid out annually, for life. QSBS intact, no day-one tax bill, no presence on your cap table.
Learn more →A talent-retention weapon against the biggest balance sheets in human history. The EMIP covers up to 30% of the startup equity of employees at Series B to E companies: a contractual cash payout on that slice if the company fails, every other share kept fully exposed to the upside if it wins, and dividend shares in the pool, shared with hundreds of seed founders and GPs, that pay them annually, for life.
Sponsor it as a benefit for about $5K per $1M covered per year. No dilution, no voting rights or board influence, and the pool never appears on your cap table.
Learn more →Insure up to half of your carried interest in a concentrated, late-stage winner, valued at today's mark, for $5K per $1M insured per year. If the company fails, you receive a contractual payout of $500K per $1M insured, over three to five years.
Whether or not the carry ever pays, you hold dividend shares in the pool for life, and can borrow against them years before the distribution. Your fund, your LPs, and the company's cap table never change.
Learn more →We don't sell founders software. We build what our founders need (a network with a financial stake in your success, and a machine that runs your whole raise) and hand it over, because we make money when you do.
Vetted founders, investors, advisors and the service providers who actually specialize in startups, plus an introduction engine that maps who knows whom, so a warm intro is always one step away. Every member holds a slice of every other member's upside through the FMIP and EMIP pools, and every founder gets downside protection and early liquidity. A network with a floor.
Explore the Founder Network →The fundraising software the market refused to build, because founders only raise every 12 to 24 months. RTFRM is all of it in one place: 2,500+ investors to research, a funnel that maintains itself, data rooms you can revoke, an investor booking page, and Marina, an AI introduction engine that reads your data room, drafts outreach in your voice, and finds the warm path in.
Explore the Fund Raise Machine →
By making the calculus of founding, joining and backing a startup an order of magnitude better, we'll help the world get an order of magnitude more startups.
Every major leap forward in technology, food security, clean energy, climate science, manufacturing efficiency, and medicine has started with a founder willing to bet everything on an idea, an early team willing to bet their careers on that founder, and investors willing to back them both. The companies attacking the world's most important problems (sustainable protein, grid-scale storage, carbon capture, AI-accelerated drug discovery) are almost universally startups. Not government programs. Not corporate R&D. Startups.
And yet the financial reality of building a startup is designed to deter exactly the people we need most. For founders and early employees, the expected value is financially negative: below-market salary for years, a greater-than-60% chance of total loss, and no access to your equity for over a decade even if it works. Even the GPs who back the winners hold much of their personal wealth in carry that is concentrated, long-dated, and not yet banked. The rational decision, for someone talented enough to build world-changing things, is to take a safer path. Sadly, most of them do.
We built Rising Tide to change that calculus. Not to make building a startup risk-free (it shouldn't be) but to make the downside survivable, the timeline to liquidity shorter, and the wealth creation real before you've already won. If we can shift the financial math even modestly, we believe significantly more people will make the leap into founding, joining, and backing startups.
And if significantly more talented people make that leap? More startups working on AI & food security. More companies attacking climate. More teams pushing on energy, manufacturing, medicine. That's not just a financial return on our products. It could be multiple leaps forward for humanity.
Every VC tells founders they're the number one priority. They're not. The VC's client is the LP who wrote the check — and the founder is the product being packaged up and sold to them. Here's the con, the math behind it, and what a venture firm that actually served founders would have to look like.
Read → May 15, 2026 The Three-Front War for Your Cap TableWhen a company gets hot, its carefully built cap table starts to unravel — right as an IPO comes into view. The squeeze hits on three fronts at once. Here's how the best operators get ahead of it.
Read → May 14, 2026 You're the Only One Without a ParachuteThe founder takes the most risk, works the most hours, and stands last in line to get paid. Everyone else at the cap table negotiated themselves a floor. Here's the case that founders should too.
Read →Rising Tide was founded by a team with multi-decade backgrounds across both the public and private markets, collectively having managed multiple billions of dollars across market cycles, asset classes, and geographies.
We've worked inside the institutions that set the rules of modern finance. We understand why those rules exist, and exactly where they break down in the world that's coming.
That combination of deep institutional knowledge and a willingness to build outside its constraints is what makes the products we build possible. Others aren't building these products because the existing financial industry profits from startup equity staying locked up, illiquid, and exposed to catastrophic risk. We built this firm to be the financial partner that founders, their teams, and their backers have never had.
We respond to every serious inquiry.
General Inquiries inbound@arisingtide.management → Founder Mutual Insurance Pool For pre-seed and seed founders. Request a private conversation. → Employee Mutual Insurance Pool For CEOs, CFOs and CHROs of Series B to E companies. Request a private conversation. → GP Mutual Insurance Pool For GPs at highly qualified funds. Request a private conversation. → Book a Call Thirty minutes with the team. →