Carta

Carta, Inc. – legally eShares, Inc. – is a San Francisco-based private company that builds software for managing capitalization tables, equity compensation, fund administration and valuations for startups and venture funds. It was founded in 2012 by Henry Ward and Manu Kumar as eShares and rebranded to Carta in November 2017. Ward remains chief executive officer and Kumar serves as chairman.

Carta raised seven priced venture rounds between 2015 and 2021, ending with a $500 million Series G led by Silver Lake in August 2021 that valued the company at $7.4 billion post-money – its highest valuation to date. Earlier backers included Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Social Capital, Meritech Capital, Tribe Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

In January 2021 Carta launched CartaX, a platform for facilitating tender offers and secondary sales of private-company stock, but the business ran into serious trouble in January 2024 when Linear's chief executive publicly accused a Carta employee of contacting one of his company's investors about a secondary sale without consent, using confidential cap-table data. Henry Ward apologized and said Carta would exit the secondary-trading brokerage business; Public acquired the brokerage accounts of that business in August 2024.

Carta's valuation was marked down sharply in secondary markets after the episode, with TechCrunch reporting a planned 2024 secondary sale at around $2 billion, before recovering to an estimated $3.5 billion in 2025 alongside reported annual recurring revenue of about $500 million.

In September 2025 Carta announced the New York Stock Exchange as its preferred listing-venue partner for late-stage private companies preparing their own IPOs, and expanded a separate partnership with Morgan Stanley days later. In May 2026 Carta acquired the UK legal-and-compliance firm Avantia and launched Carta Law, describing itself as an agentic enterprise resource planning platform for private capital. Carta itself remains privately held and has not filed for its own initial public offering.