Carta and NewView Collaborate to Make Early Employee Share Sales Easier for Startups

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Carta and NewView have teamed up to simplify tender offer processes, encouraging more startups to let employees sell shares early and improve retention amid longer private company lifespans.

Startups are increasingly staying private for extended periods, often beyond a decade, which leaves employees holding stock options without opportunities for early liquidity. To address this challenge, Carta, a leading equity management platform, and NewView, a secondary deal specialist, have formed a partnership to streamline the tender offer process. Tender offers enable employees and early investors to sell portions of their shares to approved buyers at predetermined prices, providing valuable liquidity long before a public listing or acquisition.

NewView’s founder and managing partner, Ravi Viswanathan, described the collaboration as a means to help startups launch and manage employee liquidity programs more seamlessly. The aim is to encourage CEOs and companies to view tenders as beneficial across the board — a "win-win-win" for employees, companies, and investors. This push comes amidst data showing a threefold increase in tender offers among Series C and later-stage startups over the past three years.

While tenders have historically been used by top-tier unicorns such as OpenAI, Databricks, and Anduril, they are now being adopted by a broader range of startups. For example, NewView led a tender offer last year for HighTouch, a marketing customization startup valued at $1.3 billion, despite the company being over seven years old. Emerging companies in AI and related fields, including Decagon, Wayve, and ElevenLabs, have also adopted tender offerings recently.

Despite this growth, the overall number of startups executing these liquidity events remains relatively small, with just 44 occurrences recorded in the first half of 2026. Viswanathan emphasizes that tender offers serve as excellent employee retention tools and morale boosters, especially in an environment where unicorn status alone no longer guarantees talent attraction due to the sheer number of billion-dollar private companies.

He notes that the extended private duration — often 12 to 15 years — necessitates creative solutions to prevent talent migrating to public companies. Offering employees liquidity options through structured tender offers signals that employees can realize financial gains earlier in their journey with the startup.

Through the Carta and NewView collaboration, startups now have access to tools combining Carta’s equity platform with NewView’s secondary market expertise, simplifying the complex process of secondary share transactions and making early liquidity more accessible for startup employees.