Uwill, a Boston, Mass.-based mental health and wellness online therapy platform for colleges and students, raised $5.3 million in funding from investors including Bright Horizons CEO Stephen Kramer and Princeton Review and Noodle founder John Katzman

Buckle up. It’s time to discuss one of the most thrilling documents in the startup world: The cap table. I mean, come on: It’s all in there—shareholders, types of shares, dilution.

Cap tables, the documents or spreadsheets outlining a company’s equity capitalization, may not be sending the average person to the edge of their seat—but they have caused a bit of a ruckus this year. A group of 37 companies, firms, and competitors (think AngelList, Fidelity, and Nasdaq Private Market) are banding together under the newly-minted Open Cap Table Coalition in protest of the disorganization and non-standardized formatting commonly paired with cap tables.

Prior to a company going public, there really is no standardized means of tracking ownership. Particularly as a company scales and starts adding things like convertible notes, employee stock options, and full ratchet dilution clauses, cap tables can get complex and sometimes a little disorganized. Since there’s an array of templates or formats out there, cap tables can be a headache for prospective investors to parse through, or even for employees who may need to pull equity data to apply for a mortgage.

“We keep hearing every year how frustrating this is to founders and employees,” says Tiho Bajic, CEO of capitalization technology company LTSE and founder of the Open Cap Table Coalition.

The members of the Open Cap Table Coalition—10 founding firms and 27 new members—have agreed to implement principles that will homogenize cap tables, and they’ll start working to draft an open source template. 

Next step: Getting startups to use it.

Norwest raised $3 billion for a new fund: Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture firm Norwest Venture Partners raised an expansive $3 billion for its sixteenth fund. That brings the firm’s total assets under management to $12.5 billion, according to Parker Barrile, partner at Norwest. “It’s a good time to have scalable capital,” he tells me. 

The new fund is going to “double down” on areas where Norwest is already investing, Barrile says: fintech, proptech, commerce, healthcare, vertical SaaS, HR tech, security and infrastructure, to name a few. Alongside its new capital, Norwest is publishing a formal ESG policy, codifying how the firm will operate and invest with sustainability, social, and governance issues in mind. 

Barrile says that Norwest aims to lead rounds, take a board seat, and be one of the most helpful backers to the companies in its portfolio. “I think that’s more important now than ever,” Barrile says. In a venture market where funding is essentially a commodity, “we need to show value beyond the capital,” he says.

Effectively all of Norwest’s funding comes from Wells Fargo, although it operates as an independent venture capital firm.

Home for a month: Sixth Street Growth CEO Alan Waxman told its more than 350 employees Monday that it would implement a 4-week remote work period next summer in another example of how some funds are re-thinking work during the pandemic. Sixth Street started returning to the office in phases over the summer.