eShares, Inc. (Carta)

Who owns Carta?

eShares, Inc., a private venture-backed company. Co-founder and CEO Henry Ward holds a major stake alongside investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Silver Lake.

Is Carta a public company?

No. It remains private after raising approximately $1.2 billion, most recently a $500 million Series G in August 2021. No IPO has been announced.

What is Carta's valuation?

Its last priced round valued it at $7.4 billion in 2021, but secondary markets repriced it to roughly $2 billion by 2024 as fintech valuations compressed.

What is Carta's legal name?

eShares, Inc., doing business as Carta. It was founded as eShares in 2012 and rebranded in 2017.

How does Carta make money?

Subscription fees for cap table software, 409A valuations, and fund administration services, plus legal and advisory services through Carta Law.

Does Carta still do secondary trading?

It operates the CartaX platform for private share transfers but sold the Carta Liquidity brokerage to Public in 2024, exiting direct brokering.

Who founded Carta?

Henry Ward and Manu Kumar founded it in July 2012 as eShares. Ward remains CEO; Kumar provided early funding and the concept refinement.

Henry Ward founded eShares in July 2012 after failing to raise seed funding for a previous startup, an experience that exposed him to the absurdity of paper stock certificates and spreadsheet cap tables. Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures supplied the concept's refinement and seed funding, and the company launched digitizing startup ownership records.

Adoption spread bottom-up. Investors and lawyers required cap tables, and once a startup's ownership lived on Carta it became the permanent record. The 409A valuation product added recurring subscription revenue, and by the mid-2010s Carta was nearly universal in venture-backed companies. The 2017 rename from eShares to Carta, after the Magna Carta, signaled ambitions beyond certificates.

Expansion through the late 2010s added fund administration, portfolio insights for LPs, LLC equity management, and a $500 million Series G in August 2021 at a $7.4 billion post-money valuation led by Silver Lake. The company also built CartaX, a secondary trading platform, and the Carta Liquidity brokerage to let employees sell private shares.

The strategy narrowed in the 2020s. The Liquidity brokerage, criticized for conflicts of interest in brokering on its own data, was sold to Public in August 2024. Carta exited the public company cap table business, refocused exclusively on private markets, and pushed deeper into fund administration, its fastest-growing segment. The 2024 acquisition of Avantia Law's technology created Carta Law, a legal services arm. ARR growth continued through the reset, crossing $500 million in 2025 even as the valuation compressed to a fraction of its peak.

As a software company, Carta's footprint is offices and cloud infrastructure. Its social positioning centers on private market transparency and making startup equity legible to employees, which it frames as democratizing access to ownership.

Its ethics discussion is mostly about its market power. The near-monopoly in cap tables creates pricing and lock-in criticisms, and the Liquidity episode raised questions about whether a platform operator should also broker on its own marketplace. Its data practices carry the sensitivity of holding legally definitive ownership records.

The Carta Liquidity controversy is the most significant: the secondary brokerage drew criticism for trading on the platform's own ownership data, an inherent conflict between operating a marketplace and brokering transactions on it. The company wound down and sold the unit to Public in 2024.

Pricing practices produce periodic customer backlash, with startups complaining that the effective monopoly lets Carta raise fees on customers who cannot practically leave. A 2022 security incident involving contractor data access added a modest blemish.

The valuation compression from $7.4 billion to roughly $2 billion created employee equity questions as the stock repriced below where many staff joined, a common private-company issue amplified by Carta's role managing exactly that kind of equity.