Plan your Chroma NSO exercise
Calculator · free · no signup · pre-IPOChroma is pre-IPO. Plan your NSO exercise tax (federal, state, FICA) at any expected valuation.
Beta · invite-only · AlphaLatitude Inc. · Free Tools
Your grant
Tax inputs
Hold strategy
Best after-tax payout — at year 1
$199,080
Sell + invest wins by $20,783 over Hold 1 yr.
Estimates only. Not financial advice.
Sell + invest
Best payout| Bargain element (sale − strike) | $350,000 |
| Federal | |
| State | |
| Medicare | −$5,075 |
| Additional Medicare | −$3,150 |
| Market gain over 1 yr at 10.0% | $18,573 |
| LTCG on diversified gain (fed + state + NIIT) | −$5,219 |
| Net at year 1 | $199,080 |
Sell every share immediately; invest the after-tax cash at the market return for 1 yr, then liquidate. Diversified — no single-stock concentration risk.
Exercise + hold 1 yr
| Sale proceeds (year 1) | |
| LTCG tax (federal + state + NIIT) | $0 |
| Net at year 1 | $178,297 |
Sold 2,678 shares at exercise to cover strike + tax; 2,322 shares held 1 yr for LTCG.
Social Security + Medicare are payroll taxes (collectively called FICA) — they apply because you're exercising as a current employee.
Both columns are stated in year-1 dollars: sell-now proceeds compound at the market return and pay LTCG on the gain at year 1; any cash paid out of pocket on the hold side carries the same opportunity cost.
Net at year N — by hold period
Estimates only. Excludes AMT (NSOs do not trigger AMT), state-AMT, multi-state moves, and disqualifying-disposition edge cases. Not financial advice.
You calculated one NSO decision. The beta plans NSOs alongside RSUs and ISOs in a single multi-year tax plan.
Request beta access →About Chroma
Chroma is a privately held Data company, headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
Vector database.
Equity grants at Chroma typically include incentive stock options (ISOs) and non-qualified stock options (NSOs).
Jeff Huber and Anton Troynikov founded Chroma in 2022 in San Francisco to build open-source infrastructure for storing and querying vector embeddings, the numerical representations that let large language models retrieve relevant context from external data. The database is used inside retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, where developers load documents into Chroma and query it at inference time to reduce hallucinations. Chroma raised an $18 million seed round in April 2023, led by Quiet Capital, at a $75 million valuation. As of early 2026, the package exceeds 8 million monthly downloads and is embedded in more than 90,000 open-source projects. Chroma Cloud, the managed hosted version, reached general availability in August 2025.
Sources: siliconangle.com · crunchbase.com · trychroma.com
Equity comp at Chroma
- Early-stage company (most recent confirmed round was an $18M raise led by Quiet Capital at a $75M valuation). At this stage employees typically receive ISOs and NSOs rather than RSUs, so the double-trigger framework is more relevant to options vest-and-strike timing than to RSU mechanics.
Sources: trychroma.com · siliconangle.com
Researched 2026-05-11.
OptionsAhoy is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Chroma.
Chroma NSO exercise creates ordinary income on the bargain element (federal, state, and FICA) at the price on the day you exercise. The calculator works at any valuation, so you can model your exercise cost at the current 409A FMV, an expected IPO price, or post-IPO scenarios.
All Chroma tools → · Use the generic NSO Exercise Calculator for any company.
Chroma equity questions
- How is a Chroma NSO exercise taxed?
- Exercising a non-qualified stock option (NSO) creates ordinary income on the bargain element (the price on the day you exercise minus your strike), subject to federal income tax, state income tax, and FICA. The calculator above computes that tax for your Chroma grant and compares selling the shares now against holding past the one-year mark for long-term capital-gains treatment.
- Does Chroma grant ISOs, NSOs, or RSUs?
- Equity compensation at Chroma typically takes the form of incentive stock options (ISOs) and non-qualified stock options (NSOs). Incentive stock options can trigger the alternative minimum tax (AMT) when you exercise.
- Are Chroma shares eligible for QSBS?
- They might be. Qualified small business stock (QSBS) under Internal Revenue Code Section 1202 can exclude federal tax on much of the gain when shares were acquired at original issuance from a C-corporation while its gross assets were under $50 million, and held at least five years. Whether your Chroma shares qualify turns on when you acquired them and the company's asset size at that time.
One piece of the puzzle.
OptionsAhoy plans your Chroma equity alongside hedging, vesting, and de-concentration, across bullish, neutral, and bearish market scenarios. Free during beta.