When we cover a startup’s launch, we often focus on the market opportunity, funding and investors and how the company’s product is solving a particular problem. We rarely mention the initial set of challenges every entrepreneur must face when they actually turn an idea into a startup — incorporation, stock issuance documents and more. Most of the time, startups have to incur legal costs to do this. However, Clerky, a Y Combinator-backed startup launching today, is hoping to offer entrepreneurs a quality, cost-effective, automated way to handle incorporation documents and more.
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Here’s how it works. Founders enter email address and other info such as company name, board of directors and more into Clerky. Clerky then emails all the founders and involved parties, and in a few clicks everyone can digitally sign and date everything. Clerky handles all paperwork with the Secretary of State of Delaware. The whole process happens online and entrepreneurs turn their startups into a legal, valid Delaware C Corp.
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Y Combinator has been using Clerky in stealth for three full batches with over 100 startups incorporated using the service. The forms used were developed in cooperation with YC, Orrick, Imagine K12 and an incubator named Boost.
Kirsty Nathoo, Y Combinator’s CFO (read our profile of her here) says of Clerky, “I spend lots of time working with companies to fix problems with their formation, like incomplete documentation, non-standard terms, inconsistency, etc., which usually occur when founders try to handle it themselves. When Y Combinator funds an unincorporated startup, I send the founders to Clerky and know everything will be done correctly.”