Who Owns Carta?

Henry Ward founded eShares in July 2012 after a failed attempt to raise seed funding for a prior startup showed him how broken private company stock certificates were. Investors including Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures backed the idea of digitizing paper cap tables, and the company launched its first product: software to replace the spreadsheets and paper certificates startups used to track ownership.

Early growth came from a bottom-up adoption model. Startups added cap tables because lawyers and investors required them, and once the ownership data lived on Carta, the platform became the system of record for private equity stakes. The 409A valuation product, added as a subscription service, gave it a second recurring revenue stream and made Carta nearly universal in venture-backed companies.

The company renamed itself Carta in November 2017, after the Magna Carta and the Latin word for a formal charter. Expansion followed: fund administration for venture firms, portfolio insights for LPs, LLC equity management, and eventually the CartaX secondary marketplace and Carta Liquidity brokerage aimed at enabling private share sales.

Strategic retrenchment shaped the recent years. The Liquidity brokerage, built to let employees sell private shares, struggled and was sold to competitor Public in August 2024. Carta exited the public company cap table business, deciding to focus exclusively on private markets. The 2024 acquisition of law firm Avantia Law's technology created Carta Law, a legal services arm, and the company has pushed deeper into fund administration, its fastest-growing segment. ARR crossed $500 million in 2025 at roughly 20 percent annual growth.