Dynamic duos: Two-founder teams are divvying up their equity more equally than ever

Author:

Kevin Dowd

|
Read time:

4 minutes

Published date:

18 June 2026

Founding teams come in many sizes. But two-founder teams are the most successful when it comes to raising capital. And in recent years, the way these two-founder teams divide their equity has undergone a sizable shift.

Equity is getting more equitable

Among startups formed back in 2016, about 34.5% of two-founder teams chose to divide their initial equity equally among themselves. In the other 65.5% of cases, one of those two co-founders received more equity than the other.

By 2025, those figures had experienced a double-digit shift. Last year, the rate of two-founder teams that split their equity equally rose to 44.6%, reaching its highest point of the past decade.

This reflects a broader trend across founding teams of all sizes: An equal division of equity among all founders has also grown more common among startups with three and four co-founders. But equal equity allocations are still most common among two-founder teams.

Even when two-founder teams don’t opt for a perfectly equal split of their company equity, the equity gap between the two co-founders tends to be negligible. Across all two-founder teams that formed new companies on Carta last year, the median divide of equity was 51–49. Those figures have grown substantially closer over just the past four years: In 2021, the median equity split among two-founder teams was 57–43.

For larger founding teams, the math on divvying up equity has been more consistent over the past five years—and more unequal. Among startups with three, four, or five co-founders, the lead founder still typically receives at least 10 more percentage points of equity than the next best remunerated co-founder.

Approaches to dividing equity among founding teams differ by sector. In SaaS, the median two-founder team from the past three years has opted for a 51–49 split, the same ratio found across all two-founder teams regardless of sector. In other industries, uneven splits tend to be a little more common. This is most true in biotech, where the lead founder in a typical two-founder team receives 58% of company equity.

When co-founders lose control—and when they break up

No matter how the members of a founding team decide to initially divide their equity, they usually don’t keep majority control of the company for long. As startups begin to raise funding rounds from VCs and issue equity to their employees, the math of ownership rapidly changes.

By the time a startup raises its seed round, the median founding team combines to own just 55.8% of the company’s fully diluted equity. By the time of raising a Series A, that median figure drops all the way to 36.2%.

And by the time a startup hits Series C, the typical founders aren’t even the largest shareholder base within their own company. For rounds raised between 2023 and 2025 (see below), the median founding team retains just 16.1% of fully diluted equity after raising a Series C, while the median employee ownership pool rises to 16.8% at the same stage.

Most two-founder teams stick together for many years—long enough to proceed through multiple stages of venture fundraising, if all goes well. But a significant portion do not.

Among startups founded from 2016 to 2021, somewhere between 25% and 35% of two-founder teams had parted ways after five years, depending on the exact year of founding. Among startups founded from 2016 to 2018, more than 40% of two-founder teams experienced a breakup within eight years of forming their company.

By definition, this statistic is a lagging indicator: As we’ve seen, those companies formed in the mid-2010s were created in a different environment than the new crop of startups being launched in 2026. Will the more equitable approach to distributing equity that has emerged in recent years encourage two-founder teams to stick together for longer than they used to? To find out, we’ll have to be patient. Check back in the 2030s.