NewView and Carta Team Up to Make Employee Share Sales Easier for Startups

As startups stay private for longer, employees who receive part of their pay in stock often have little chance of cashing it out. NewView and Carta have now joined forces in an effort to change that, aiming to make it simpler for companies to let staff sell some of their holdings before an exit.

The mechanism at the center of the partnership is the tender offer. In such a transaction, employees and, in many cases, early investors can sell a portion of their shares at a set price to an approved buyer. More late-stage companies are turning to the approach as the wait for a public listing or acquisition stretches on.

The collaboration pairs NewView's experience structuring secondary deals with Carta's equity platform. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, described it as a way to help startups launch and run liquidity programs more smoothly. "The hope is that this partnership will make it easier for CEOs and companies to think about tenders," he said. He encouraged founders to see early liquidity as a "win-win-win" for employees, companies and investors.

Data from a recent study by NewView Capital and Carta suggests the practice is spreading. Over the past three years, tender offers among Series C and later-stage startups are projected to have grown threefold. Viswanathan said the companies running them are no longer limited to the most valuable private firms, such as OpenAI, Databricks or Anduril.

As an example, he pointed to Hightouch, a marketing customization startup. Last year, NewView, which pursues secondary transactions alongside conventional venture investing, led a tender for the company at a $1.3 billion valuation, when it was seven years old.

Even so, the practice remains far from universal. The same research found that only 44 tender offers were executed in the first half of 2026, a small share of eligible startups. Viswanathan wants to widen that group, calling tenders strong retention tools and morale boosters.

He argued that the standard recruiting pitch has also lost some of its force. A decade ago, reaching unicorn status was enough to attract talent, he said, but the number of billion-dollar companies today means the label carries less weight. A tender, in his view, "is an opportunity to say you will also get liquidity in your journey with us."

Recent companies to hold tender offers include Decagon, an AI customer support startup; Wayve, which develops self-driving technology; and ElevenLabs, an AI voice generator that carried out two such offerings in under a year.

Viswanathan said the longer timelines are unlikely to reverse. "The companies are staying private for 12 to 15 years. That's not changing," he said. To prevent a talent drain from high-quality venture-backed companies to their public counterparts, he added, "we need to make sure that there is liquidity for the employees."