Carta

Carta, whose legal name is eShares, Inc., builds software for managing private company equity. It digitizes stock certificates, options, warrants and other securities so companies, investors and employees can track ownership, and it offers 409A valuations and portfolio and fund management tools used by venture firms. Henry Ward, the chief executive, and Manu Kumar, the chairman, founded the company as eShares in 2012. It began doing business as Carta in November 2017 and is headquartered in San Francisco. As of August 2022 it reportedly tracked more than $2.5 trillion in company equity and had facilitated $13 billion in secondary sales.

In August 2015 eShares raised a $17 million Series B led by Spark Capital. In October 2017 it raised a $42 million Series C led by Menlo Ventures and Social Capital, with Matt Murphy and Arjun Sethi joining the board; a Form D filed that month reports a $41.5 million equity offering. A $80 million Series D led by Tribe Capital and Meritech Capital Partners in December 2018 valued the company at $800 million. In May 2019 Andreessen Horowitz led a $300 million Series E at a $1.7 billion valuation, matching a $300 million Form D. A 2020 Series F valued Carta at $3.1 billion; an amended Form D reports $210 million sold, with first sale on April 7, 2020. A Form D filed in August 2021 reports a further $500 million equity offering with first sale on July 30, 2021.

Carta remains private and active. It acquired SVB Analytics, the valuation business of Silicon Valley Bank, in 2017, UK rival Capdesk in 2022, and Avantia, a legal and compliance platform for asset managers, in May 2026, when it launched Carta Law. In January 2021 it opened CartaX, a private stock exchange, and sold just under $100 million of its own stock on it; CartaX shut down in 2024 after a customer data controversy. Reports in 2024 put the company's valuation below $2 billion, about 75% under its 2022 peak. Carta has raised about $1.2 billion in venture capital in total.

Carta is a venture-backed company whose product is infrastructure for venture investing itself, and many of its customers are the funds and startups its investors back. Its history shows the risk in late-stage marks: Spark Capital and Menlo Ventures entered at early rounds, while capital raised in 2020 and 2021 came at valuations that 2024 reports placed well above later estimates. Fourteen years after founding, its investors have no public market exit, and liquidity has come mainly through secondary sales such as the CartaX transaction.