NewView and Carta Link to Open Early Stock Sales for Startup Staff

NewView and Carta have formed a partnership to simplify the process for startup employees to sell their stock before a company goes public. The collaboration combines NewView's experience in secondary deals with Carta's equity management platform. The goal is to make it easier for private companies to launch and manage liquidity programs for their staff.

The transaction mechanism is the tender offer. In these deals, employees and early investors can sell a portion of their shares to an approved buyer at a set price. This approach has become more common as the wait for an initial public offering or acquisition has extended. A recent study by NewView Capital and Carta projects that tender offers among Series C and later-stage startups have grown threefold over the past three years.

Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, stated that the partnership is designed to help founders run liquidity programs more smoothly. He described early liquidity as a win-win-win situation for employees, companies, and investors. Viswanathan noted that the trend is no longer limited to high-valuation firms such as OpenAI, Databricks, or Anduril.

He cited Hightouch, a marketing customization startup, as a specific example. Last year, NewView led a tender offer for Hightouch at a valuation of $1.3 billion. At the time of that transaction, the company was seven years old. This example illustrates that mid-stage companies are increasingly utilizing these financial instruments.

Despite the growth, the practice remains rare among all eligible startups. The same research found that only 44 tender offers were executed in the first half of 2026. Viswanathan argued that these offers serve as strong retention tools. He suggested that the traditional recruiting pitch based solely on reaching unicorn status has lost some of its force as the number of billion-dollar companies has increased.

Recent companies to hold tender offers include Decagon, an AI customer support startup, and Wayve, a self-driving technology developer. ElevenLabs, an AI voice generator, conducted two such offerings in less than a year. Viswanathan expects private timelines to remain long, estimating that companies will stay private for 12 to 15 years. He said that liquidity must be available to prevent a talent drain from venture-backed firms to public companies.

The partnership aims to address the financial gap for employees who receive a portion of their compensation in equity. By streamlining the administrative and legal processes, the two firms intend to make it more accessible for CEOs to consider tender offers as a standard part of company management. The initiative targets the specific needs of companies that are late in their funding rounds but not yet ready for a public listing.