Carta Teams Up with NewView to Encourage Startups to Enable Early Employee Share Sales
Startups are extending their time as private entities, which leaves employees—who usually receive part of their pay in stock they can’t readily sell—without much chance for early access to funds.
Many late-stage startups are becoming aware of this issue and are now providing tender offers for their employees. These offers enable employees (and often early backers) to sell a portion of their shares at a set price to an approved investor.
To streamline the tender process, NewView Capital has teamed up with Carta. This collaboration merges NewView’s expertise in secondary deal structuring with Carta’s equity management platform. Ravi Viswanathan, the founder and managing partner of NewView, believes this partnership will assist startups in implementing and overseeing liquidity initiatives more effectively.
“The goal is to simplify the tender process for CEOs and their companies,” he explained. He encourages founders to consider offering employees early liquidity as a mutually beneficial move for staff, businesses, and investors.
An increasing number of startups appear to agree. Research from NewView and Carta indicates that tender offers for Series C and later-stage startups have tripled in the last three years. Moreover, the firms participating in these offers are no longer limited to just top-tier private companies like OpenAI or Databricks, according to Viswanathan.
For example, last year, NewView assisted in a tender offer for Hightouch, which was valued at $1.3 billion when it was seven years old, demonstrating their capacity to facilitate secondary deals alongside typical venture investments.
However, Carta and NewView’s research shows that the number of startups engaging in these offers remains relatively limited, with only 44 completed in the first half of 2026. Viswanathan aims to motivate other startups to consider tender offers, describing them as valuable tools for retention and morale enhancement.
Viswanathan pointed out that a decade ago, having a unicorn status was sufficient for attracting talent, but with the proliferation of billion-dollar companies today, that status may no longer be as appealing. A tender offer, he remarked, “is a way to communicate that employees will also gain liquidity while being part of our journey.”
Noteworthy companies that have recently executed tender offers include AI customer service startup Decagon, autonomous technology developer Wayve, and AI voice generation company ElevenLabs, which completed two such offers within a year.
“Companies are remaining private for 12 to 15 years, and that trend isn’t likely to change,” Viswanathan noted. “In the meantime, to prevent a talent exodus from high-quality venture-backed firms to their publicly traded counterparts, it’s crucial to provide liquidity options for employees.”
