Athennian

Athennian is a cloud-based entity management platform that helps organizations manage their corporate legal data, compliance workflows, and entity structures. Founded in 2017 by Adrian Camara, a former corporate lawyer at McCarthy Tétrault, the company emerged from firsthand experience with the chaos of corporate record-keeping at scale. As Athennian scaled rapidly—growing from $1M to $6M ARR in just 20 months during 2020-2022—the company needed equity management infrastructure that could keep pace with their growth. Like many fast-scaling startups, maintaining an accurate cap table became increasingly complex as they raised institutional capital, expanded their team, and navigated the volatility of the tech market. That's when Athennian turned to Mantle.

The Challenge

Rapid growth demanded professional equity infrastructure

Adrian's background as a transactional lawyer gave him a front-row seat to how poor corporate record-keeping could derail major deals. He'd seen tax reorganizations fall apart at closing because entities on org charts didn't actually exist—expensive mistakes that reinforced the need for systems over spreadsheets.

But as Athennian experienced explosive growth during the pandemic era, Adrian faced the same challenge with his own company's equity management:

• Hypergrowth complexity: Scaling 5x in under two years while raising a $40M+ Series B meant rapidly evolving cap table needs

• Signal vs. noise: Unprecedented market conditions made it difficult to understand true demand patterns and make sustainable hiring decisions

• Resource allocation: During a period when talent costs doubled and strategic decisions compounded over time, Adrian needed clear visibility into equity as a resource

• Board governance: Working with an impressive board through difficult restructuring decisions required transparent, trustworthy equity data

Adrian knew from his legal practice that equity is one resource you can't get back once it's allocated. He needed a solution that made cap table management effortless—because, as he observed, "the value of any ledger system is directly indexed to the quality of the data, and you can let it decay if there's not forcing function to keep it updated."

The Solution

Effortless accuracy through intelligent automation

Athennian became a Mantle customer in 2023, and for Adrian, the decision came down to a single defining moment:

"When I gave you all of our legal docs, and 60 seconds later, we had a cap table system that was updated. That was really early in this like AI cycle."

That early vision of AI-powered equity management solved a critical problem Adrian understood deeply: reducing the labor cost of keeping data current. For Athennian, Mantle delivered:

• Instant accuracy: Upload legal documents and get an up-to-date cap table in moments, not hours or days

• Effortless maintenance: Minimal effort required to keep the system current, preventing the data decay that plagues traditional cap table tools

• Strategic visibility: Real-time understanding of ownership structure during critical growth and restructuring decisions

• Intuitive design: A founder-focused interface that made equity management accessible without constant legal or financial expertise

"You have to reduce the labor costs to keep the data up to date or the value of the system decays over time. I think it was the vision on that being so early on that attracted me to it."

The Results

Clear equity data through periods of transformation

By adopting Mantle, Athennian gained the equity infrastructure needed to navigate one of the most volatile periods in recent tech history:

• Strategic decision-making: Clear cap table visibility supported difficult but necessary decisions during the 2022-2023 market correction

• Sustainable scaling: Proper equity tracking helped Adrian optimize shareholder value as the company matured from technique-focused early stage to systems-focused growth stage

• Operational efficiency: The platform's ease of use meant equity management didn't become a bottleneck during rapid scaling or restructuring

• Long-term reliability: Three years later, Athennian continues to rely on Mantle as a core part of their financial infrastructure

"We've been using Mantle for two or three years now ever since. And it's been a great product, high quality. And the vision on intuitive, effortless design has continued. So we're happy."

Looking Ahead

As Athennian continues to expand its entity management platform across professional services, real estate, private equity, and multinational corporations, Mantle remains a critical part of the company's operational foundation. For Adrian, Mantle represents the same principle he's building into his own product: systems should do the work, humans should do the verification.

"The direction of travel on data is that it needs to be more liquid such that it can be communicated faster. Mantle understood that early and built accordingly."