iSAFE — India Simple Agreement for Future Equity

A US-style SAFE has no equivalent recognised instrument under the Companies Act 2013 — Indian company law does not permit a security that is neither equity, debt, nor a convertible instrument with defined terms. An iSAFE reproduces the economics (valuation cap, discount, most-favoured-nation clause) of a SAFE but is legally executed as a CCPS or CCD, so it has a conversion mechanism, a share class, and a filing trail the ROC and RBI both recognise.

The choice between CCPS-wrapped and CCD-wrapped iSAFE usually turns on FEMA: a foreign investor writing a cheque before a priced round typically needs the FDI-compliant CCPS wrapper so the FC-GPR filing goes through as an equity instrument, since debt-route foreign investment carries separate ECB constraints. A resident (Indian) investor has more flexibility to use either wrapper.

The cap, discount and MFN terms are contractual overlays on top of the underlying CCPS/CCD conversion mechanics — Saral stores them as structured fields on the instrument so that when the priced round happens, the conversion price and share count compute automatically rather than being re-negotiated from a PDF.

The cap table, where iSAFE — India Simple Agreement for Future Equity appears as a computed field traced to the ledger event that created it.