“Like Having an Equity Partner Right by My Side”: Why PhaseV Switched to Slice Global

Before PhaseV found Slice, managing equity meant spreadsheets, relying on outside counsel, and a great deal of double checking.

PhaseV is a BioTech research company based in Tel Aviv and Cambridge, Massachusetts, working to shorten trials. Its equity program covers roughly 100 stakeholders. Most are in the US and Israel, and the rest are spread throughout the globe.

“When I came in, it was a very manual process,” said Alex Kremer, VP of Finance and Operations at PhaseV. “It was one of the things that I thought took way too long.”

Today, by Alex’s estimate, PhaseV handles 95% of its equity management in-house, with outside counsel now using the platform only to review information. Grant letters that used to take two to three hours of emails and chasing now go out in a few clicks. New grants go into Slice from the offer letter, even when the board meeting is months away. And the Israeli deadlines that once had to be tracked by hand arrive as alerts before they fall due.

Before Slice: Accountable for Something He Couldn't Verify

When Alex arrived, PhaseV’s equity programs lived in spreadsheets and were tracked manually.

Everything was entered by hand, transferred between files, then checked again. A cap table question from an investor took two people and a round of double-checking. An employee asking about their own grant could be told “we'll get to you in a week,” while the details were confirmed a third time.

The deeper problem was not speed. It was that Alex was accountable for a function he could not independently verify.

“Something's going to be wrong eventually,” he said. “It's just a matter of when we'll find it.”

Expertise was available, but only by the hour. Outside counsel reviewed the work and in some cases produced it, hand-entering grant tables ahead of board meetings, with PhaseV's own internal counsel intervening when possible.

“I didn't think our internal legal counsel needed to be spending so much time on this type of thing,” Alex said, “when it really was an organization problem.”

What he wanted was not to outsource the problem further.

“I just personally wanted to have a bit more control. I wanted to have a bit more at my fingertips, so that I could see what's going on in real time, and when an employee asks a question, I can answer it quickly.”

The catalyst

Under Section 102, Israel's employee equity tax regime, grants made through an approved trustee can qualify for capital gains treatment rather than ordinary income, and the deadlines that come with it are set by the regime rather than the company. (What Section 102 requires, and when.)

“Israel has some nuanced laws around granting equity and how to treat it from a tax perspective, and very rigid dates when things need to get submitted,” he said. “That was all new to me, so I took another lens: I need to reevaluate, rather than just go to things I was familiar with.”

The Decision: A Platform That Already Knew the Rules

So Alex went into the evaluation looking for more than a system of record. He wanted a platform that could guide him through the complexities of managing equity in Israel and in every other country where PhaseV has people.

“You can move an Excel file into a platform seamlessly, but one of the things that particularly struck me with Slice was the ability to manage all the nuances for Israeli employees. There are tax treatments, there's a lot of reporting that needs to be done at certain timeframes, and so the ability for Slice to not only be aware of those things, but also to send the notifications — let us know what the ticking clock is to make sure we don't miss deadlines, let us know things that are of different levels of compliance risk — those actually guide me, versus entering things into a platform.” — Alex Kremer, VP of Finance and Operations at PhaseV

Slice maintains the equity rules for 67+ countries and attaches them to the grants they govern. An Israeli obligation appears on the Israeli grant it applies to, and the same holds for an employee in any other country PhaseV grants in. Alerts carry a priority level, and a weekly digest sends the urgent ones to the admins responsible.

For someone new to the jurisdiction, that was the point.

“As somebody newer to working with Israeli companies, I actually thought that would be a real asset.”

The Results: Running It Without Becoming an Expert

What changed is not that Alex became an equity expert. It is that he stopped needing to be one to do the work.

“I'm actually allowing the platform to remind me of things without me putting it in the calendar. Everything happens kind of automatically once you upload the equity grant.”

More than once, a flag has caught a higher-risk issue the team might otherwise have missed. Alex is on the platform often, and by his account confident that he is “not going to miss any of the important compliance issues.”

“Those flags are super helpful - they act as a reminder: don't forget to ping this person, don't forget to send this out, don't forget to input these things. That's like having an equity partner right by my side,” said Alex Kremer, VP of Finance and Operations at PhaseV.

Starting at the offer letter

Slice now comes into PhaseV’s process much earlier. Grant details once waited for the board meeting, when outside counsel entered them by hand. Now they are captured the moment an offer is made.

“Right off the bat, we now have a new onboarding process on the administrative side. We track that offer letter with all the equity information and can put it into Slice right away, even if a board meeting's three months away. There's not a risk of forgetting to upload something, or to record that, or of the numbers typed in an Excel file not matching the offer letter. We're using it much earlier in the process.”

SliceAI makes that step fast. Admins can upload a file, such as an offer letter, into SliceAI Chat and have it analyzed alongside the data already in Slice, inside the same permissions and security model as the rest of the platform. For PhaseV, that closes the gap between what arrives automatically from its HR system and what doesn’t.

“Some information comes directly from our HRIS system, some does not, so I can upload certain parts of an offer letter and say, ‘Create a grant from this.’ And it does all that work quickly and easily. It saves even more time,” said Alex Kremer, VP of Finance and Operations at PhaseV.

When someone leaves

The same applies at the other end of an employee’s time at PhaseV. A departing employee needs to know whether they can exercise, on what terms, and what they have to do next.

“When the person departs, we let them know: great, if you want to exercise, these are the terms and things you have to do. It just makes it really easy, versus having to go to outside counsel and have them put hours into doing that.”

SliceAI can draft customized termination emails from the grant data already in Slice. Post-termination exercise periods nearing expiration also appear in the weekly compliance digest, so the deadline stays tracked after the conversation ends. For Alex, a departure is now something his team handles directly, from records it already trusts.

Knowing what to ask

Getting an answer to your question is just half the battle, the other half is figuring out what you should have asked.

SliceAI takes care of that for you. SliceAI sits on every page of the platform and works from PhaseV's own records, giving the tool the insight it needs to prompt the user to identify areas of risk that the company may not have been aware of.

“I'm not a legal or equity expert, so it's helpful that I have my core question, and then SliceAI can say, ‘Here's another thing you might want to ask about this.’ It really makes me think about whether I've thought about all the things that I should think about before I take it to external counsel.”

Put all of this together and there isn't much left that PhaseV needs to rely on outside counsel for.

“We shifted from fully manual, fully external counsel to doing 95% of it ourselves.”

The people behind the platform

Alex also points to Slice’s support team, and the speed of its answers.

“Support isn't something to forget. The people, when I do have issues, are super helpful, and I actually find myself apologizing for asking them certain questions, because they're so quick,” said Alex Kremer, VP of Finance and Operations at PhaseV.

What Alex Tells Other Finance Leaders

For Alex, the verdict is simple: Slice “exceeded expectations.”

“I love it. I'm like a super fan.”

None of it works without one thing, and for someone who cannot personally check the rule behind every alert, it is the thing that matters most.

“It's very intuitive and trustworthy. I've used platforms in the past that are also quite simple to the user, but maybe they missed something.”

“With the Slice platform, you want to do more on it, because you trust it, and it's easy to navigate,” said Alex Kremer, VP of Finance and Operations at PhaseV.

Managing equity in a country your team doesn't know yet? Request a demo from Slice and see what the platform flags before you have to ask.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does Slice handle Israeli requirements such as Section 102? Slice tracks the Israeli requirements attached to each grant, including Section 102 tax treatment and the reporting deadlines that come with it, and sends alerts before those deadlines fall due. The same approach covers every other country you grant in, so US and Israeli obligations sit side by side.

Q: How do compliance alerts reach the right people? Alerts appear in Slice's Compliance Center against the grants they relate to, each with a priority level. Admins with compliance access also receive a weekly email digest of time-sensitive and new high-priority alerts: upcoming filing deadlines, post-termination exercise periods nearing expiration, grants that may need review, and missing or inconsistent data.

Q: What can SliceAI do with our own equity data? SliceAI is on every page. Select something on screen, such as a grant, a report or a compliance item, and ask about it; or upload a file, such as an offer letter or a cap table from your lawyers, and have it analyzed alongside the data already in Slice.

Q: Does SliceAI replace outside counsel? No. SliceAI gives a grounded starting point, with citations to Slice's legal knowledge base and other verified sources, and helps you work out what to ask before a question goes to counsel. Decisions that need a lawyer still go to one, and outside counsel can have their own access to Slice to review the work where it lives.

Q: How much of the work can we bring in-house? It depends where you're starting and what your counsel handles today. What changes is the split: routine record-keeping, deadline tracking, document generation and signatures run inside the platform, which leaves counsel's time for the judgment calls. PhaseV's team estimates it now handles 95% itself, with one of its firms reviewing inside Slice.

Q: How do grant letters and signatures work? Grant letters go out from inside the grant workflow, using rich-text email templates with smart placeholders such as stakeholder name, grant size, vesting date and exercise price. Slice tracks every signature by status, including company signatories and witnesses where a jurisdiction requires one, and lets you re-send to anyone still outstanding.

Q: Can employees get answers about their own equity? Each employee has a profile in Slice with their grants. Companies can also switch on SliceAI for employees, a guided way to ask common questions, such as how vesting works or what grant conditions mean, directly in Slice. It's generally available and off by default; your Customer Success Manager can enable it.