A floor under the downside, upside your employees can keep, and liquidity before your exit, without ever touching your cap table. The Employee Mutual Insurance Pool (EMIP) covers the startup equity of employees at Series B to E companies. Each employee can cover up to 30% of their equity: they get a contractual cash payout on that slice if your company fails, keep every other share fully exposed to the upside if you win, and hold dividend shares in the Rising Tide pool that pay them annually, for life. That pool is shared with hundreds of seed founders and late-stage GPs, so your team's dividends draw on the best seed winners we insure, not only on your own exit. You can sponsor it as a benefit for about $5K per $1M covered per year. There is no dilution to your company, no voting rights or board influence, and the pool never appears on your cap table.
When OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Meta calls your staff engineer, they call with liquid stock and near-certain outcomes. You counter with options in a private company: paper your employees mentally mark to zero in a down round, that they can't borrow against, and that pays nothing if the company misses.
Unfortunately, the tools on your side of the table are thin. Secondaries are episodic, discounted, and set a price while putting new investors on your cap table. Repricing burns the 409A and risks a lawsuit. And you can't compete on cash salary. The EMIP is a new arrow in the quiver: make the equity outcome more certain, and give your team a share in the upside of hundreds of other startups.
Same grant and vesting. The only difference is whether a slice of the equity is covered.
| Uncovered equity | Covered, $1M face in the EMIP | |
|---|---|---|
| To the candidate | A lottery ticket against big-tech RSUs. | An asset with a contractual floor, lifelong dividends from a pool of hundreds of startups, and borrowing power. |
| If the company fails | They walk away with nothing, and remember it. | A $500K payout per $1M covered, in cash over three to five years, or extra pool shares. |
| Liquidity before exit | Secondaries: episodic, discounted, price-setting, new investors. | They borrow against their pool ownership. No sale, no discount, no new shareholders. |
| Your cap table and governance | Tenders bring outsiders on. | Untouched. We never hold your stock. Cost: $5K per $1M per year, a rounding error next to the cost of a counter-offer or a backfill. |
You can't compete on cash salary. The EMIP is a new arrow in the quiver: make the equity outcome more certain.
Employees forward the covered slice's exit proceeds to the pool and keep the rest of their equity fully exposed to the upside. Illustrated on $5M of employee equity, 20% covered.
| Covered: 20% of the equity in the EMIP | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exit | Uncovered equity, post-tax |
Remaining 80%, post-tax |
Payout | + Dividends & pool shares‡ |
Total, covered |
| Failure (0×) | $0 | $0 | $500K | +$3.91M | $4.41M |
| 1× | $4.00M | $3.20M | $0 | +$3.91M | $7.11M |
| 3× | $12.00M | $9.60M | $0 | +$3.91M | $13.51M |
| 5× | $20.00M | $16.00M | $0 | +$3.91M | $19.91M |
| 10× | $40.00M | $32.00M | $0 | +$3.91M | $35.91M |
| 20× | $80.00M | $64.00M | $0 | +$3.91M | $67.91M |
Whole grant: $5M of equity at today's value, 20% ($1M face) covered; post-tax, illustrative assumptions; expected values; premiums paid by the employer.* ‡ ~$3.91M per $1M covered (~$2.85M dividends + ~$1.06M pool shares), the same in every row, because dividend shares are minted per $1M covered, not per outcome. Covered comes out ahead up to an exit of ~4.9× today's value. One member in three lands on the failure row.
Like a whole-life insurance policy, covered employees become members of the mutual pool, with long-term dividend rights in its profits, proportional to equity covered. It's the same pool, and the same dividend share, as every seed founder and GP we insure. The pool pays out surplus profit to its members annually, for the life of the pool.3
Where the money comes from, for the average employee covering $1M of equity:*
Averages, so components add exactly; premiums are paid by the employer, so they are not deducted from the member. Uncovered: mean ~$1.8M, median ~$0.8M. † Averaged across all members; a failed member receives the full $0.50M per $1M covered.
The model is calibrated to your company's late-stage reality, not seed-stage lottery math: PitchBook puts Series D+ outright failure near 13%; we model a conservative 30% blend for B to E exposure, winners capped at 30×, exits in ~3 to 7 years. Your employees' equity then sits in one pool with the seed founders' and GPs' books. Across the whole pool, founders and GPs included, the modeled loss ratio, claims against all inflows, runs around 0.17: the underwriting funds itself, and dividends are paid from surplus, not from new members' premiums.*
Why your team shares a pool with founders and GPs. Series B to E equity fails far less often than seed and exits sooner, so it steadies the pool while the seed book matures; seed founders' rare large winners and GP carry add upside and early cash of their own. Run as one, the pool needs about 2.9× less worst-case cash than the same three books run as separate pools, and in the model it ends year 40 about 36% larger. How the pool works.
We don't publish a public simulator for the EMIP. The model, its calibration, and the pricing for your company are available to the companies we're underwriting; ask us to walk you through it on a call.
We are multi-decade venture investment veterans, and we only cover employees at companies we would underwrite and invest in ourselves. So being coverable is a strong positive signal you can put in an offer letter. And the floor is deliberately partial: 50 cents on the covered dollar. Employees still want the win; the EMIP just makes saying no to the inbound recruiters more rational.
Cover your team from Series B onward, when the poaching starts and your equity story needs teeth. If you're a founder rather than a company, we built something for you too, in the same pool.
About $5K per $1M covered, per year. The company can sponsor it as a benefit line item, or the employee can pay the premium directly.
No. The contract sits on the employee's own equity. The company issues nothing, dilutes nothing, grants no voting rights or board influence, and the pool never appears on the cap table.
Only the covered slice's. Employees cover up to 30% of their equity; the pool receives that slice's exit proceeds, and every other share stays fully exposed to the upside. On a $5M grant with 20% covered, the employee comes out ahead up to an exit of about 4.9× today's value.
Each covered employee receives a contractual payout of 50% of their covered equity ($500K per $1M covered), in cash over three to five years, or as extra dividend shares in the pool.
Because the pool is sturdier with all three. Your employees' later-stage equity fails less often and exits sooner, which steadies the pool; seed founders' rare large winners and GP carry add upside and early cash. Run as one, the pool needs about 2.9x less worst-case cash than the same three books run as separate pools.
Series B to E companies that Rising Tide underwrites first. We only cover employees at companies we would invest in ourselves, so being coverable is a signal you can put in an offer letter.
Cover your team from Series B onward, when the poaching starts and your equity story needs teeth.
* Illustrative and hypothetical. Not a forecast, guarantee, or offer. Figures are Monte-Carlo output for an EMIP member of the blended Rising Tide pool (the FMIP, EMIP and GPMIP books on one balance sheet) at the model's defaults (200 paths; EMIP book: 30% failure, α = 3.0, 30× cap, ~3 to 7-year exits, per PitchBook Q3 2024 and Carta data; the covered slice is a forward on its exit proceeds): median covered-employee outcome ≈4.0× covered face, mean ≈4.1×, versus ≈0.8× median and ≈1.8× mean uncovered, over a 40-year horizon, with premiums paid by the employer, including payouts, dividends, reinvested claim shares, and pool-share value. Modeled loss ratio of the blended pool ≈0.17 (claims against all inflows). Worked exits: $5M of equity, 20% ($1M face) covered, simplified tax assumptions (20% on a zero basis). Model verified 23 October 2026.
† Averaged across all members; a failed member receives the full $0.50M per $1M covered.
‡ Approximately $2.85M cumulative dividends plus $1.06M pool-share value per $1M covered, identical in every exit row because dividend shares are minted per $1M covered, not per outcome.
3 Dividends are paid only from pool surplus and are not fixed obligations. Payouts, dividends, and pool values are model outputs and targets, not promises.
4 Individual tax and QSBS treatment vary; consult your advisors. All terms are indicative and subject to final terms, underwriting, and regulatory approvals. The FMIP, EMIP and GPMIP are in structuring as a single mutual pool; no insurance policy or security is offered hereby, and no regulatory approval has been sought or obtained. Rising Tide Management LLP.