The wordmark of a company that started life as "eShares." The rebrand to Carta - Latin for the document that records who owns what - was the least subtle hint about the ambition.
In private capital, nobody could ever say for certain who owned what. Carta turned that question into a database - and quietly became the back office of the startup economy.
Walk into almost any venture-backed startup in America and ask a simple question: who owns this company? A decade ago, the honest answer was a shrug and a phone call to a lawyer. The truth lived in a drawer, in a PDF, in a spreadsheet a founder was afraid to touch. Today the answer is a login. That login, more often than not, is Carta.
Carta sits underneath the private economy like wiring inside a wall - invisible until something sparks. It tracks shares, options, and warrants for tens of thousands of companies. It runs the books for thousands of venture funds. When an employee wonders what their equity is worth, when a fund manager closes a quarter, when a late-stage company starts mapping a path to the public market - Carta is in the room, usually without anyone noticing it walked in.
Ownership used to be a secret kept in a filing cabinet. Carta made it a thing you could query.
- The central idea, in one sentenceA cap table is the document that records who owns how much of a company. It decides who gets rich, who gets diluted, and who quietly gets nothing. For an asset class built on equity, it is the single most important file in the building. And for decades it was maintained the way you'd maintain a grocery list - in Excel, by hand, copied and re-copied, occasionally with errors that surfaced years later at the worst possible moment.
The irony was hard to miss. An industry obsessed with measuring everything could not reliably measure its own ownership. Stock certificates were still paper. Option grants lived in email threads. A 409A valuation - the number that sets the price of every employee option - was a consulting project that took weeks. The information that mattered most was the information nobody trusted.
An industry that bet billions on data couldn't say, with confidence, who owned its own companies.
- The gap Carta walked intoField note: The legal entity behind Carta is still called eShares, Inc. - a small museum exhibit of the company it used to be, hiding in the fine print.
Henry Ward did not set out to build this. He had just failed - his fixed-income startup, Secondsight, never raised its seed round. During that failed raise he met investor Manu Kumar, who floated a different idea: what if someone built software to manage stock certificates? It was not a glamorous pitch. It was, on its face, a pitch about paperwork.
They co-founded eShares in July 2012. Ward became CEO; Kumar became chairman. The bet was unfashionable: that the boring administrative layer of equity - the part everyone wanted to ignore - was actually a market. Most people disagreed. "Nobody believed that this could be a big business," Ward has said. The company's first month of revenue was $700, and the team treated it like a holiday.
"Nobody believed that this could be a big business."
- Henry Ward, co-founder & CEOThe contrarian read turned out to be correct. The work nobody wanted to do was exactly the work everybody needed done. Carta's wedge was the cap table, but the strategy was always the same: become the system of record, then expand outward from it.
The early years were a grind against indifference. Convincing a founder to move their ownership records onto a new platform meant convincing them to trust a startup with the one file they could not afford to lose. Carta won its first hundred customers one nervous conversation at a time, leaning on lawyers and investors who could vouch that the software did what it promised. Trust, it turned out, was the real product. The code was just how you delivered it.
Carta's genius was never a single feature. It was a foundation. Once a company's ownership lives in one trustworthy place, a long list of painful tasks suddenly become buttons. The cap table is the anchor; the rest of the suite hangs off it.
Shares, options, warrants, and SAFEs in one live system - the end of the spreadsheet you were afraid to touch.
The independent number that prices every employee option, delivered as a product instead of a multi-week project.
Issue, manage, and exercise employee equity - with the tax and compliance machinery handled underneath.
Back-office software for venture funds and SPVs - 9,000+ entities, $185B+ in assets under administration.
Tender offers and structured liquidity so private shareholders don't have to wait a decade to sell.
Dashboards that connect fund managers, their LPs, and portfolio companies in one shared view.
Translation: Carta sells subscriptions priced by how complicated your ownership is - then sells you the services that complication creates. The mess is the business model.
It is easy to dismiss a paperwork company. It is harder to dismiss one that quietly became the default. By many estimates Carta now sits beneath the majority of venture-backed startups in the US for cap table management - the kind of market share that turns a product into infrastructure.
Figures are public estimates (Sacra, getLatka) and approximate. ARR, not GAAP revenue.
The validation is not only in the numbers - it is in the company Carta keeps. In 2025 it signed the New York Stock Exchange as its preferred US listing venue for late-stage private companies, and expanded a partnership with Morgan Stanley covering equity compensation for companies going public and wealth management for their founders. The plumbing company was being invited into the boardroom.
You know you've won a category when the incumbents stop competing and start partnering.
- On the NYSE and Morgan Stanley dealsStrip away the product names and Carta's stated purpose is unusually human for a fintech: create more owners. The pitch is that ownership shouldn't be a privilege reserved for people who can afford lawyers - it should be legible, liquid, and accessible to the employee with a handful of options as much as the partner at a fund.
That mission also explains the data habit. Carta publishes its State of Private Markets reports on funding, valuations, and equity, and the venture industry reads them like a weather forecast. It is a clever move: the company that holds the data becomes the company that defines the conversation. Owning the record means owning the narrative about the record.
It is a mission with teeth, too. Equity is where startups make their grandest promises and, sometimes, their quietest betrayals - a grant that looked generous until a down round, a vesting cliff nobody explained, a tender offer that arrived for some and not others. By making the record visible to everyone on it, Carta changes the power dynamics in the room. An employee who can see their position is harder to surprise. That is not charity; it is the logical endpoint of a company whose entire premise is that ownership works better in the light.
Hold the data long enough and you stop reporting the weather. You start being it.
- On Carta's research engineThe private economy is getting larger and staying private longer. Companies that once would have gone public in five years now wait ten, or never. That creates an enormous, illiquid, hard-to-track pool of ownership - exactly the problem Carta was built for, now scaled to the size of an entire asset class. The wiring inside one startup's wall is becoming the grid for the whole neighborhood.
There are real questions ahead. Valuations on secondary markets have softened from the 2021 peak. Competitors are circling the cap table. Concentration brings scrutiny - the system of record carries a responsibility to be both accurate and fair to everyone reading it. None of that is settled.
But return to that opening room. The founder asked who owns this company, and once the only honest answer was a shrug. Now it is a screen anyone in the cap table can open, see, and trust. That is the change Carta actually shipped. Not a unicorn valuation, not a logo on a press release - a simple, stubborn idea: that the people who own something should be able to see that they do.