The challenge
Tourlane started using GAIA almost five years ago, at a turning point that will be familiar to any fast-growing startup. The company had an ESOP in place, but it was built for a small senior team, managed through Word documents, paper signatures, and a single spreadsheet. When Tourlane decided to extend equity participation to all employees, the program scaled overnight from a handful of participants to around 150. Every month with new hires meant another batch of grants. The spreadsheet approach that had worked well enough before was about to break completely.
Franck Pascault, Tourlane's CFO, saw what was coming. "When we rolled out the ESOP to all employees, we multiplied by 10x overnight. Every time new people joined, there were another 20 batches." He knew a software solution was necessary and began evaluating options, including starting an onboarding process with a competitor. What ultimately brought him to GAIA was a combination of two things: the product was being built with Tourlane's specific requirements in mind, and the founding team included trained lawyers. "On those topics you cannot do it wrong. It has to be right and it has to save you time. GAIA met both conditions."
How GAIA helped
ESOP and cap table management. Today, Tourlane manages over 3,000 individual grants on GAIA, a number that makes the original spreadsheet approach unthinkable. Beyond the volume, what Franck values most is accuracy. During Tourlane's fundraising rounds, investors immediately asked for a complete, up-to-date ESOP list. With GAIA, that's a straightforward request. "You can check your fully diluted cap table at any moment," Franck explains. "Before we had very little visibility, and when it came to our Series C, I remember doing it manually and it took me two days just to prepare the list."
The compliance dimension matters just as much as the time saved. "Investors, lenders, the board, they have zero tolerance for an error on capital structure. You don't want to be surprised at an exit that you forgot 200 people received grants and the value needs to be distributed across more people." GAIA gives Tourlane a single source of truth that holds up under scrutiny.
Shareholder resolutions. The second major workflow GAIA transformed was shareholder and board resolution management. Previously, Franck was handling this through PDF-based e-signature tools, manually placing signature boxes, chasing shareholders, and managing the process largely by hand. A routine resolution could take half a day. "Now, once the content is aligned internally, it takes me 30 minutes, including chasing shareholders. That used to be half a day, every one to two months."
Employment contracts. GAIA also connects the equity and HR workflows for Tourlane's people team. Employment contracts are managed through GAIA as a template and signature platform, saving the team time on every hire and reducing the back-and-forth that came with manual document handling. The result is that equity events and new hire contracts can be handled in one place rather than across disconnected tools, giving both the finance and HR teams a shared operational foundation.
Results
Without GAIA, Franck estimates he would have needed to bring on a dedicated person just to manage the administrative load.
Instead, that overhead stayed off the headcount, and the finance and people teams operate with a level of compliance confidence that manual processes simply couldn't provide.
Working with GAIA
Tourlane's day-to-day relationship with GAIA runs primarily through Slack. "I always get a response within a couple of hours, and issues are typically resolved within 24 hours," Franck says. "Compared to all the other tools we use, really good." After five years, the GAIA team knows how Tourlane works, which keeps support fast and low-friction.
What Franck would tell a peer
After five years, Franck sees GAIA as sitting at the heart of company decision-making - not a back-office tool. His advice to peers is direct:
