Carta and NewView Team Up to Simplify Startup Employee Share Sales

Tender offers among Series C and later-stage startups are projected to have grown threefold over the past three years, according to a recent study from NewView Capital and Carta. The two firms are now partnering to make these employee share sales easier to run.

The partnership, announced recently, pairs NewView's secondary deal-structuring experience with Carta's equity platform. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, pitches the combination as a way for startups to launch and manage liquidity programs more seamlessly.

"The hope is that this partnership will make it easier for CEOs and companies to think about tenders," Viswanathan said.

Why are tender offers gaining traction?

Startups are staying private longer, and that leaves employees stuck. Workers at private companies typically take a portion of their compensation as stock they can't sell, with little hope of early liquidity. Tender offers — transactions that let employees and often early investors sell a portion of their shares at a predetermined price to an approved investor — have become the standard workaround.

A growing number of startups now agree. Viswanathan said the companies running tenders are no longer just the most valuable private firms like OpenAI, Databricks, or Anduril.

Last year, NewView, which specializes in secondary deals alongside typical venture investments, led a tender for HighTouch at a $1.3 billion valuation. The marketing customization startup was seven years old at the time.

Recent tender offers also include:

• Decagon, the AI customer support startup
• Wayve, the self-driving technology developer
• ElevenLabs, the AI voice generator, which executed two offerings in less than a year

What's holding more companies back?

Despite the growth, Carta and NewView found the overall share of startups launching tenders remains relatively small. Just 44 were executed in the first half of 2026.

Viswanathan wants to change that. He calls tender offers excellent retention tools and morale boosters, and frames them as a "win-win-win" for workers, companies, and investors alike.

A decade ago, being a unicorn was enough to attract talent, Viswanathan said. With so many billion-dollar companies around today, that status may not carry the same pull. Offering a tender, he said, "is an opportunity to say you will also get liquidity in your journey with us."

How long will startups stay private?

Not shorter, in Viswanathan's view. "The companies are staying private for 12 to 15 years. That's not changing," he said.

"In that interim, so that we don't have this talent drain from high-quality venture-backed companies into their public counterparts, we need to make sure that there is liquidity for the employees," Viswanathan said.

The bet from Carta and NewView is that as the 12-to-15-year private timeline persists, more founders will treat structured liquidity programs as standard practice rather than an exception. The 44 tenders in the first half of 2026 suggest that market still has plenty of room to grow.