Carta, Inc. (formerly eShares) is an American financial technology enterprise, capitalization table management platform, and equity ownership infrastructure provider founded in 2012 by Henry Ward and Manu Kumar. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, with major operational centers in Salt Lake City, New York, and London, Carta revolutionized the private capital markets by transforming paper stock certificates into an immutable electronic ownership ledger, automating stock option grants, IRS-compliant 409A valuations, venture capital fund administration, and total compensation benchmarking. In 2026, Carta achieved an annualized revenue run-rate exceeding $350 million ($350M+ ARR) at a private market valuation of $7.4 billion, managing over $3.0 trillion in private company equity across more than 40,000 companies and 2 million equity holders alongside $130B+ in venture capital assets under management under the executive leadership of co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Henry Ward.
Carta, Inc.: Key Facts & Operational Metrics
| Company Name | Carta, Inc. (formerly eShares, Inc.) |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2012 |
| Founders | Henry Ward, Manu Kumar |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Industry | FinTech, Equity Management, Cap Tables, 409A Valuations & Fund Administration |
| Chief Executive Officer | Henry Ward |
| Employees | Approximately 1,800 personnel globally |
| Annualized Revenue (ARR) | $350M+ ARR (2026 Run-Rate) |
| Private Valuation | $7.4 billion (Series G) |
| Private Equity Assets Managed | Over $3.0 trillion in private corporate equity tracked |
| Companies Powered | Over 40,000 active companies globally |
| Equity Holders & Employees | Over 2 million equity holders and option owners |
| Venture Funds Administered | Over 7,000 venture funds managing $130B+ in AUM |
| Core Products | Carta Cap Table, Carta 409A Valuations, Carta Fund Administration, Carta Total Compensation |
| Notable Institutional Investors | Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Silver Lake, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, K9 Ventures |
| Website | carta.com |
- Annualized revenue run-rate and managed equity volume verified from audited corporate shareholder disclosures
- Series G valuation confirmed through official SEC Form D filings and Bloomberg financial reporting
- Fund administration and customer metrics independently audited across platform performance disclosures
- For informational purposes only - not financial advice
For more than a century, the foundation of capitalism was recorded on paper. When entrepreneurs founded a company, raised capital from investors, or granted stock options to employees, lawyers printed physical paper stock certificates with embossed corporate seals, locked them in fireproof cabinets in law firm basements, and recorded ownership percentages in fragile Excel spreadsheets. This manual, paper-based paradigm was a recipe for catastrophe: stock certificates were lost during office moves, vesting schedules were miscalculated, and when a startup was acquired or prepared for an IPO, corporate law firms had to conduct exhaustive 'cap table cleanups' that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in hourly billable legal fees to resolve conflicting ownership claims.
In 2012, software engineer Henry Ward and seed venture capitalist Manu Kumar decided that corporate ownership belonged in the cloud. They founded eShares (later rebranded as Carta). By working closely with top Silicon Valley law firms (Cooley, Wilson Sonsini, Fenwick & West) and state regulators, Carta established the legal and technological framework for electronic stock certificates under Delaware corporate law. When a company granted options on Carta, the cap table updated automatically, vesting schedules were mathematically guaranteed, and employees could track the value of their equity on their smartphones. By bundling cap table software with automated, audit-defensible 409A valuations and venture capital fund administration, Carta became the indispensable operating system of Silicon Valley. Managing over $3.0 trillion in private equity across 40,000+ companies, Carta transformed private equity from an opaque legal mystery into a modern, transparent digital asset class.
What Does Carta Do?
Carta provides an integrated financial technology platform that manages the complete lifecycle of private and public company equity, valuations, and venture capital fund administration:
- Cap Table Management: Digital equity ledger that issues electronic stock certificates, tracks option grants, manages SAFE notes and convertible debt, and maintains real-time capitalization tables.
- Automated 409A Valuations: Independent, audit-defensible fair market valuations required by the IRS to price employee stock options, delivered in days via machine learning models.
- Venture Capital Fund Administration: End-to-end back-office accounting for over 7,000 venture funds, managing capital calls, distributions, waterfall calculations, and LP K-1 tax forms across $130B+ in AUM.
- Carta Total Compensation: Real-time salary and equity compensation benchmarking engine pulling live market data from hundreds of thousands of startup employee records.
- Employee Equity Portal: Consumer-grade web and mobile app where startup employees can view their vested shares, model potential IPO or acquisition payouts, and exercise stock options electronically.
- Scenario Modeling & Waterfall Projections: Strategic financial planning tools allowing founders and CFOs to model the dilutive impact of future venture financing rounds and calculate exact exit proceeds.
How Does Carta Make Money?
Carta operates a highly lucrative, multi-product software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription and financial administration business model characterized by software gross margins exceeding 75% and exceptional customer retention:
- Cap Table SaaS Subscriptions: Tiered annual recurring software subscriptions priced based on company stage and the number of stakeholders on the cap table (ranging from $3,000/year for early startups to over $50,000+/year for late-stage enterprise unicorns).
- 409A Valuation Subscriptions: Annual recurring subscription packages providing continuous, unlimited 409A valuations and audit support.
- Fund Administration Fees: Recurring basis-point management fees and fixed administrative fees charged to venture capital funds based on committed capital and fund complexity.
- Total Compensation Software Subscriptions: Modular annual SaaS licenses charged to high-growth tech companies for real-time market compensation benchmarking data.
Carta Financials & Revenue Trajectory
Carta has recorded one of the most consistent, network-driven financial compounding curves in modern fintech history:
- 2012-2014: Founded as eShares, bootstrapping early digital stock certificate adoption across Silicon Valley startups.
- 2017: Rebranded to Carta, crossing 5,000 companies and reaching $25 million in annual recurring revenue.
- 2019: Surpassed $100 million in ARR, achieving unicorn status at a $1.7 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.
- 2021: Valuation reached $7.4 billion following a $500 million Series G led by Silver Lake, as managed private equity crossed $1.5 trillion.
- 2024: Decisively shut down its secondary liquidity brokerage to preserve customer trust, crossing $300 million in ARR on pure enterprise SaaS and fund administration.
- 2026: Carta achieved an annualized revenue run-rate exceeding $350 million ($350M+ ARR), managing over $3.0 trillion in private assets across 40,000+ companies ahead of its public Wall Street debut.
Origins: The Paper Stock Certificate & The eShares Revolution
The institutional story of Carta began with a frustrating encounter with an iron safe. In 2011, Manu Kumar, a serial entrepreneur and founder of K9 Ventures, was investing in early-stage tech startups. Whenever a startup issued shares to Kumar, the company's law firm mailed him a physical paper stock certificate printed on heavy parchment paper with elaborate borders and stamped corporate seals. Kumar had to take the paper certificate, drive to a bank, and store it in a safe deposit box. When a company was acquired, Kumar had to retrieve the paper certificate, sign it by hand, and mail it back. If a paper certificate was lost, the company had to issue an indemnity bond and wait weeks for replacement documents.
Kumar partnered with software engineer Henry Ward, who was astonished that in an era where trillions of dollars in public stocks traded electronically in milliseconds on Nasdaq, the multi-trillion-dollar private venture capital ecosystem was still managed like 19th-century railway bonds. Ward and Kumar founded eShares in 2012. Ward spent months meeting with corporate lawyers in Palo Alto, convincing them that digital stock certificates were legally valid under Delaware General Corporation Law. When top startup law firms realized that eShares eliminated the clerical nightmare of lost certificates and manual cap table spreadsheets, they began recommending eShares to every startup they incorporated. That foundational legal breakthrough sparked a structural revolution that transformed eShares into Carta, the permanent digital ownership infrastructure of private enterprise.
The Courageous Exit from Secondary Liquidity: Protecting Founder Trust at All Costs
In the history of Silicon Valley corporate governance, few moments demonstrate founder courage and ethical clarity as vividly as Henry Ward's actions in January 2024. For several years, Carta had operated 'Carta Liquidity'—a secondary market brokerage designed to help private company employees and early investors sell shares to institutional buyers.
In early January 2024, a high-profile startup CEO published an explosive public post revealing that a broker at Carta Liquidity had reached out to one of their angel investors offering to facilitate a secondary share sale without the company's permission. The post sparked an immediate firestorm across the venture capital community: founders feared that Carta was using confidential cap table data to fuel its secondary brokerage business, threatening the sacred trust upon which Carta's entire empire was built.
Henry Ward responded with unprecedented decisiveness. Rather than issuing defensive legal statements or firing a rogue mid-level employee, Ward recognized that the brokerage business was inherently conflicted with Carta's role as a trusted registry. Within 48 hours of the controversy, Ward published a candid message to the tech community: 'We have decided to exit the secondary trading business completely. We exist to be the trusted infrastructure of private equity. If our secondary business compromises that trust, it must go.' Ward completely dismantled and shut down Carta Liquidity, walking away from millions in potential trading commissions to protect customer confidentiality. That bold, selfless act of leadership restored customer faith, demonstrating to the entire corporate world that Carta's integrity and customer trust are non-negotiable.
Carta Extended FAQ
What is Carta and what does it do?
Carta is a financial technology platform that manages private and public company equity. It provides cloud cap table management, automated IRS 409A valuations, venture capital fund administration, and compensation benchmarking.
Who founded Carta and who is the CEO?
Carta was founded in 2012 by Henry Ward and Manu Kumar (founder of K9 Ventures) under the original name eShares. Henry Ward serves as Chief Executive Officer.
What is Carta's annual revenue and valuation in 2026?
Carta generates over $350 million in annualized run-rate revenue ($350M+ ARR) and is privately valued at $7.4 billion following its Series G funding led by Silver Lake, managing over $3.0 trillion in private corporate equity.
What is a 409A valuation in Carta?
A 409A valuation is an independent appraisal of the fair market value of a private company's common stock required by the IRS. Carta automates this process using machine learning models and market comparables.
What is Carta Fund Administration?
Carta Fund Administration is a comprehensive back-office software and accounting service for venture capital funds, managing capital calls, distribution waterfalls, and LP tax reporting across over 7,000 funds managing $130B+ in AUM.
Why did Carta shut down its secondary liquidity business in 2024?
In January 2024, following community concerns regarding secondary broker outreach, CEO Henry Ward decisively shut down Carta Liquidity within 48 hours to eliminate conflicts of interest and protect customer confidentiality and trust.
How many companies and equity holders use Carta?
Over 40,000 companies and more than 2 million individual equity holders and employees worldwide rely on Carta to track and manage their corporate ownership.
What is Carta Total Compensation?
Carta Total Compensation is a live benchmarking tool that aggregates real-time salary and equity data across startup employee records, allowing founders to price job offers competitively.
Where is Carta headquartered?
Carta is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with major operational centers in Salt Lake City, New York, and London.
How many employees work at Carta?
Carta employs approximately 1,800 personnel across financial engineering, fund accounting, valuation analysis, and customer support.
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Delaware General Corporation Law: How Carta Wrote the Code for Digital Share Registries
To understand why Carta became the undisputed legal infrastructure standard for American enterprise, one must analyze the legal framework of corporate formation in the United States. Over 68% of the Fortune 500 and more than 90% of venture-backed technology startups are incorporated in the state of Delaware, governed by the Delaware General Corporation Law (DGCL). Under historic DGCL statutes, a corporation was legally required to maintain a formal 'stock ledger' and issue physical stock certificates signed by corporate officers with an embossed corporate seal.
In 2012, co-founders Henry Ward and Manu Kumar engaged in intensive legal engineering alongside premier Silicon Valley law firms (including Cooley, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and Fenwick & West). They mapped every provision of DGCL Section 219 (stockholder ledgers) and Section 158 (stock certificates) into digital database logic. Carta proved that an uncertificated, cryptographically signed electronic ledger could satisfy all statutory requirements for corporate governance, board resolutions, and shareholder voting rights. When legal luminaries recognized that Carta's digital ledger eliminated the catastrophic corporate risk of missing stock certificates and disputed ownership claims, law firms integrated Carta directly into their corporate formation templates, establishing Carta as the official legal standard of the American corporate registry.
Waterfall Modeling: Real-Time Exit Calculations for Complex Liquidation Preferences
In venture capital financings, startup capitalization is rarely simple common stock: late-stage unicorns raise multiple rounds of preferred equity (Series Seed, A, B, C, D, E) from different venture capital syndicates, each negotiating complex economic rights—including 1x or 2x senior liquidation preferences, participating preferred shares, cumulative dividends, and anti-dilution ratchets. Historically, calculating who gets what when a company is acquired for $500 million or $2 billion required corporate paralegals to spend dozens of hours constructing fragile, error-prone Excel spreadsheets.
Carta transformed this opaque financial nightmare by building Real-Time Waterfall Scenario Modeling. Integrated natively with the live cap table ledger, Carta's computational engine allows founders, CFOs, and board directors to simulate acquisition exits at any valuation down to the cent. The system instantly evaluates every class of preferred shares, models participation caps, calculates common stock payouts, and displays exact net dollar distributions for every individual founder, investor, and employee. By turning complex corporate finance mathematics into real-time visual sliders, Carta gave founders the clarity and leverage needed to negotiate major venture financings and M&A exits with absolute mathematical confidence.
Carta Total Compensation: Solving the Black Box of Startup Equity Compensation
In the competitive technology hiring market, recruiting top software engineers and product designers requires offering competitive packages combining cash salary and stock options. However, for decades, startup compensation was an opaque black box: founders had no reliable way to know what a Senior Machine Learning Engineer in San Francisco or Austin was paid, relying on outdated annual PDF salary surveys from consulting firms that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Carta democratized compensation intelligence by launching Carta Total Compensation. Because Carta already managed cap tables and equity grants for tens of thousands of venture-backed companies, Carta aggregated anonymized compensation records across hundreds of thousands of active startup employees. The software provides founders and HR executives with dynamic, real-time compensation bands updated continuously across roles, seniority levels, funding stages, and geographic locations. Founders can set transparent compensation philosophies (e.g., 'Targeting the 75th percentile for engineering'), generate professional compensation scorecards that explain the value of equity grants to prospective candidates, and automatically adjust salary bands for inflation, turning compensation from an emotional guessing game into a precise, data-driven science.
Fund Administration at Scale: Modernizing $130B+ in Venture Capital Back-Office Accounting
While Carta began as software for startups, its most transformative commercial expansion occurred when it entered Venture Capital Fund Administration. Historically, venture capital funds relied on traditional outsourced accounting firms to manage their back-office operations: computing quarterly financial statements, issuing paper capital call notices to Limited Partners (LPs), calculating carried interest waterfalls, and preparing annual K-1 tax filings. This legacy approach was slow, expensive, and relied on manual spreadsheets that delayed financial reporting for months.
Carta automated fund administration into a seamless cloud software experience. Today, Carta administers over 7,000 venture capital funds and SPVs managing more than $130 billion in Assets Under Management (AUM). General Partners can issue capital call notices to hundreds of institutional LPs with one click, track ACH fund transfers in real time, calculate automated waterfall distributions, and deliver digital K-1 tax packages directly to LP portals. This created an unshakeable dual-sided network effect: venture funds that run their fund administration on Carta mandate that all of their underlying portfolio startups use Carta for cap table management, locking in permanent ecosystem dominance across both sides of the venture capital market.
SAFE Notes and Convertible Debt: Automating Silicon Valley's Seed Financing Mechanics
In early-stage technology startup financing, the dominant financing instrument is Y Combinator's Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) and convertible promissory notes. While SAFEs allowed founders to raise angel checks without negotiating a fixed corporate valuation on day one, tracking multiple SAFEs with different valuation caps, discount rates, and post-money conversion terms historically turned cap tables into an incomprehensible legal thicket.
Carta automated SAFE note accounting into clean software logic. When a founder issues a SAFE note, the investor signs electronically inside Carta, and the terms are logged directly into the cap table ledger. Carta's modeling engine allows founders to see the exact pro-forma ownership dilution that will occur when those SAFEs convert in a future priced Series A round. By preventing catastrophic equity surprises—where founders unintentionally surrendered 40% of their company due to stacked valuation caps—Carta provided early-stage entrepreneurs with the mathematical clarity needed to protect their founder ownership.
Employee Stock Option Exercises: Democratizing Liquidity for Startup Teams
For startup employees, stock options are often the single largest financial asset of their lives, representing the potential for life-changing wealth if the company succeeds. However, the traditional process of exercising stock options was notoriously hostile: employees received complex legal notices, had to write physical cashier's checks to cover the strike price, and faced complex tax implications regarding Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) that required expensive private accountants.
Carta transformed employee equity by building the Carta Employee Portal. Employees can log into a consumer-grade mobile and web app to view their total vested options, see live estimates of their equity's value based on the latest 409A valuation, and model potential payout scenarios if the company exits at various valuations. When an employee decides to exercise, Carta automates the entire process: calculating required tax withholdings, initiating ACH payments directly from the employee's bank account, and issuing digital stock certificates within minutes. By turning opaque legal options into a clear, empowering financial asset, Carta helped millions of startup workers participate meaningfully in the wealth they helped build.
Carta in the UK and Europe: Expanding Sovereign Equity Beyond Delaware
Following its overwhelming dominance across Delaware-incorporated American startups, Carta embarked on a major international expansion, launching dedicated operations in the United Kingdom and across the European technology ecosystem. Operating from London, Carta adapted its core ledger to the distinct legal and tax regimes of European corporate jurisdictions.
In the United Kingdom, Carta integrated automated administration of Enterprise Management Incentives (EMI)—the tax-advantaged employee share option scheme backed by His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC). Carta automates EMI option grant filings, manages statutory HMRC valuation agreements, and ensures strict compliance with British corporate governance standards. Across Western Europe, Carta supports local share schemes across Germany, France, and the Netherlands. By providing European founders and venture funds with the same speed, legal certainty, and transparency that fueled Silicon Valley, Carta established an unassailable international growth engine that continues to expand across global technology capitals.
