Carta

Overview

Carta is a San Francisco-based equity-management company that sells software for managing capitalization tables, valuations, portfolio investments and equity plans — the record of who owns what at a private company (TechCrunch). Founded in 2012 as eShares by Henry Ward and Manu Kumar, it replaced paper stock certificates with electronic securities, reached an $8.5 billion valuation in 2022, then retreated from secondary trading in 2024 after a customer-data controversy and a steep valuation reset (TechCrunch; TechStartups).

This profile covers Carta, Inc. (formerly eShares, Inc.), the private-markets software company. Its arc is a valuation round-trip: $800 million to $8.5 billion and back toward $2 billion in six years.

eShares to unicorn: digitizing ownership

Carta began as eShares in 2012, founded by entrepreneur Henry Ward with serial investor Manu Kumar, on the idea that venture-backed firms needed a way to digitally manage equity, issue securities and maintain accurate cap tables instead of mailing paper certificates (TechStartups). Ward’s framing, quoted in the company’s own telling, was a simple question: why could you buy public stock on your phone, while investing in a private company cost $20,000 in legal fees, took 45 days to close, and ended with a mailed paper certificate (TechStartups).

The business scaled through the decade. By December 2018, Carta — then Palo Alto-based — had announced an $80 million Series D at an $800 million valuation led by Meritech and Tribe Capital, bringing total funding to $147.8 million, with $500 billion in equity under management, 450 employees, and customers including Robinhood, Slack, Wealthfront, Squarespace and Coinbase (TechCrunch). Ward credited the progress to “popularizing electronic securities and cap table software, combined with audit-ready 409As” — the independent valuations that set the strike price for employee stock options (TechCrunch). A $300 million Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz followed in May 2019 at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation, with Marc Andreessen joining the board, and by then Carta was an SEC-registered transfer agent serving 11,000 companies and 700,000 shareholders, with a fund-administration business launched in mid-2018 already holding $9 billion in assets under administration (TechStartups).

The peak came fast. After a $3.1 billion Series F in early 2021, Carta ran an auction on its own trading platform, selling $100 million of its own shares to secondary buyers at a $6.9 billion valuation, then used that price as evidence to primary investors — Silver Lake ultimately led a $500 million Series G at $7.4 billion in August 2021, more than double the Series F valuation eight months earlier (TechCrunch). Roughly fifteen months later, in late 2022, Ward told Axios the company was worth even more — $8.5 billion — following a separate secondary sale, though he did not disclose how many shares sold or to whom (TechCrunch). The same year Carta bought its way into Europe, acquiring the UK equity-management company Capdesk — founded in 2015, used by more than 3,500 European startups with over £90 billion in assets on its platform — which continued as an independent “Capdesk from Carta” unit, shortly after its June 2022 acquisition of Vauban (Sifted).

The secondary-market ambition and the trust break

Carta’s grander goal, beyond cap-table software, was to become a private stock market: the transfer agent, brokerage and clearinghouse for all private stock transactions. It launched CartaX, an exchange that aimed to find buyers for shares through auctions — the same system it had used to bolster its own valuation (TechCrunch).

That ambition broke on trust in January 2024, when Finnish CEO Karri Saarinen complained publicly that Carta was using information about his company’s investor base to try to sell its shares to outside buyers without the company’s knowledge or consent (TechCrunch). Ward first blamed a rogue employee, but as other founders compared notes and shared similar experiences, Carta said within 72 hours that it was getting out of the business line: “Because we have the data, if we are trading secondaries, people will always worry that we are using the data, even if we are not,” Ward wrote, “so we have decided to prioritize trust, and exit the secondary trading business” (TechCrunch). By June 2024 Carta was working with the investment bank Jefferies on a secondary sale targeting a $2 billion valuation — initially hoping for $4 billion, though even $2 billion “may prove ambitious” according to TechCrunch’s sources — a $6.5 billion cut from the 2022 peak (TechCrunch). The underlying business was still growing — 2023 revenue was put at $380 million — but it lost $65 million that year, and fund administration had not found a way to be profitable on a gross-margin basis (TechCrunch). The Day-23 connection runs through its customer base: Alloy named Carta among the banks and fintechs using its identity-decisioning platform (BusinessMole).

What this profile does not claim

• The June 2024 $2 billion figure was a target for a sale in progress, reported from unnamed sources — not a completed valuation — and no final price was confirmed.
• Manu Kumar as co-founder rests on a tier3 source; the tier1 sources read name Henry Ward alone, and the profile flags this rather than presenting it as tier1-verified.
• No current (2026) valuation, revenue or customer count is claimed; the latest verified figures are from 2023, reported in 2024.
• Carta’s earlier location history is noted, not smoothed over: Palo Alto in 2018 coverage, San Francisco in 2021 coverage.