Carta and NewView Team Up to Make Employee Share Sales Easier

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NewView Capital has partnered with Carta to simplify tender offers, the deals that let startup employees sell part of their shares at a set price to an approved investor. NewView specializes in secondary deals alongside regular venture investing. Carta runs an equity platform.

Startups are staying private longer, and employees who take part of their pay in stock have little chance to sell it early. Ravi Viswanathan, NewView's founder and managing partner, hopes the tie-up will make it easier for CEOs to consider tenders. He wants founders to see early liquidity as a "win-win-win" for workers, companies and investors.

Growing, but still rare

A recent study by NewView and Carta found that tender offers at Series C and later-stage startups increased threefold over the past three years. Viswanathan says the companies running them are no longer just the most valuable private ones such as OpenAI, Databricks or Anduril. He pointed to Hightouch, a NewView portfolio company that held a tender offer last year at a $1.3 billion valuation.

The same data shows the practice is still uncommon. Only 44 tender offers were executed in the first half of 2026 across the dataset. Recent examples include Decagon, Wayve and ElevenLabs, which carried out two such offerings in less than a year.

Viswanathan calls tenders excellent retention tools and morale boosters. A decade ago, he said, being a unicorn was enough to attract talent, but with so many billion-dollar companies that status may not draw as much now. A tender lets a company tell recruits they will also get liquidity along the way.

"The companies are staying private for 12 to 15 years. That's not changing," he said. Without liquidity for employees, he argued, high-quality venture-backed companies risk a talent drain to their public counterparts.

Source: TechCrunch