Carta and NewView team up to streamline employee share sales at private startups

Extended private company timelines have created a problem for startup employees: they hold equity compensation that cannot be converted to cash, leaving them without meaningful liquidity opportunities. To address this challenge, an expanding cohort of mature startups has begun implementing tender offers—structured transactions enabling workers and early backers to liquidate portions of their holdings at predetermined valuations to qualified buyers.

Carta and NewView have joined forces to streamline this process. The partnership merges NewView's expertise in structuring secondary transactions with Carta's equity management infrastructure. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, frames the collaboration as enabling founders to establish and operate liquidity initiatives with greater efficiency. "The hope is that this partnership will make it easier for CEOs and companies to think about tenders," he said. Viswanathan characterizes employee liquidity programs as mutually beneficial arrangements for workers, enterprises, and capital providers.

Market adoption appears to be accelerating. Research conducted jointly by NewView Capital and Carta projects that tender offer activity among Series C and later-stage companies will triple over the past three years. Beyond marquee names like OpenAI, Databricks, and Anduril, the practice has expanded to less prominent ventures. NewView led a tender for marketing customization platform HighTouch at a $1.3 billion valuation when the company was seven years old, demonstrating the trend's reach beyond elite unicorns.

Despite this growth trajectory, adoption remains limited. Only 44 tender offers were completed during the first half of 2026, according to Carta and NewView's analysis. Viswanathan advocates for broader uptake, positioning tenders as powerful retention mechanisms and morale-building tools. He notes that unicorn status alone no longer carries the magnetic appeal it once did in talent recruitment, given the proliferation of billion-dollar enterprises. Offering liquidity, he contends, "is an opportunity to say you will also get liquidity in your journey with us."

Recent examples of companies executing tender offerings include AI-powered customer support provider Decagon, autonomous vehicle developer Wayve, and voice synthesis company ElevenLabs, which conducted two separate offerings within a single year.

Viswanathan emphasizes the structural reality driving this shift: "The companies are staying private for 12 to 15 years. That's not changing. In that interim, so that we don't have this talent drain from high-quality venture-backed companies into their public counterparts, we need to make sure that there is liquidity for the employees."