Carta stock & equity tools

eShares, Inc., doing business as Carta, Inc., is a San Francisco, California-based technology company that specializes in capitalization table management and valuation software. The company digitizes paper stock certificates along with stock options, warrants, and derivatives to allow companies, investors, and employees to manage their equity and track company ownership. The company also operated CartaX, a private stock exchange, which was shuttered in 2024.

Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Henry Ward and Manu Kumar founded Carta, originally eShares, in 2012 to digitize paper stock certificates and replace spreadsheet-based cap tables with auditable, legally compliant software. Companies use Carta to issue equity, model dilution, run 409A valuations, and manage employee option exercises. The platform expanded to serve venture funds with LP portfolio management tools. Carta raised $500 million in a Series G led by Silver Lake in August 2021 at a $7.4 billion valuation, its last disclosed primary round, and reached $442 million in annual recurring revenue in 2024.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org · techcrunch.com

Equity comp at Carta

• Carta issues single-trigger RSUs (awards where shares vest and settle immediately on each vesting date, with no separate IPO or acquisition trigger required) to its own employees, providing liquidity through quarterly windows on its own private secondary platform, Carta Liquidity. At each window, Carta withholds shares equal to the employee tax liability and remits taxes directly, so employees receive net shares with no out-of-pocket tax obligation at vest. Current employees may sell up to 20% of vested holdings per window. This structure makes a second liquidity-event trigger unnecessary: liquidity occurs on a schedule rather than only upon an IPO or sale.
• Early exercise is not allowed: you have to wait for shares to vest before you can buy them.

Sources: carta.com · carta.com · henrysward.medium.com

Researched 2026-05-10.