20 Things You Didn’t Know About Carta

Carta is a fintech startup that provides its clients with a global ownership management platform. It serves investors, employees, and companies in the management of equity and ownership. The solutions that Carta provides are helpful to financial companies and their stakeholders. If you’re not yet familiar with this company, but would like to know more, here are 20 things you probably didn’t know about Carta that might be helpful.

1. Carta serves private companies

According to Crunchbase, Carta acts as a transfer agent for private companies. The solutions that it provides are designed for businesses that are at the developmental stages between seed to pre-IPO. It offers electronic equity management that extends to its shareholders as well as its employees, auditors, and legal counsel.

2. Carta is modernizing the financial industry

Carta provides electronic solutions that modernize the processes involved in issuing stock certificates and related products by digitizing paper stock certificates, warrants, stock options, and derivatives. It creates real-time images that show ownership and presents information about who owns what at companies. The visualization of ownership provides a picture to go along with the data and helps by providing this visual information in one convenient location.

3. Carta is a versatile enterprise

Carta is listed under four main industries. It is a finance company that provides software and services. It develops and produces software and services as a FinTech company, and it provides services for stock exchanges. These are the four industry headings that it falls under, which makes it a versatile company that offers a variety of solutions.

4. Carta has been around a while

Carta is not a new startup. It has been in operation for nine years. The business was founded in 2012. The legal name is eShares, Inc., but it is commonly known as Carta, which is the platform that it offers to its clients. The headquarters for Carta is located in San Francisco, California. The founders are Henry Warn and Manu Kumar.

5. Henry Ward is a serial entrepreneur

Henry Ward is a co-founder of Carta, which was formerly eShares. He has a background in technology and finance. Before founding eShares, he found a company called Secondsight and served as the CEO of the organization. it offers a portfolio optimization solution for retail investors. He earned his BGS in Math and Computer Science and the University of Michigan, and also attended EDHE Business School earning an MSC in Market Finance. He is an angel investor who has made 9 personal investments. In June of 2021, he invested $60 million in a Series B round of funding for Airbase. In May of 2021, he invested $11 million in a Series A round for Tilled, preceded by a $3 million investment in a Seed round for Firstbase.io. He invested $6 million in a venture round for Lobus in April, $20 million in a Series A round for On Deck in March, $3.5 million in a Seed Round for Citadel Payroll APIs in February, and. $2.3 million in a funding round for Toybox Labs in February. In September of 2019, he invested an undisclosed amount in Laika, and in December of 2020, he invested $12.4 million in a Seed Round for Synctera.

6. Manu Kumar is also a serial entrepreneur

The second founder of Carta also brings years of experience in business to the endeavor. Before Carta, he founded a company called K9 Ventures, serving as Chief Firestarter of the organization. In addition, he co-founded a company called HiHello, serving as its CEO, as well as co-founding and investing in Carta. Mr. Kumar is also an investor who has made investments of $7.5 million in HiHellos in a round of Series A funding and an undisclosed amount in a Seed Round for a company called Figure Eight.

7. Carta is led by an 8-member core executive team

The executive leadership team at Carta is comprised of 8 core members. Henry Ward is co-founder and chief executive officer. Charly Kevers is the chief financial officer. Christine Ngo is the vice president of services, investor services. Jare Hobbs is a software engineer. Robert Balousek is the director of engineering. Alex Legault is the group product manager. Gregory Chang is the vice president of product, and Jane Alexander is the chief of staff.

8. Carta has a 7-person board of directors

The board of directors at Carta is comprised of seven members. Each board member serves as an advisor on strategic planning, financial, and other executive matters about the growth and direction that the company takes. Matt Murphy is a managing director and partner at Menlo Ventures with one portfolio company. He currently serves on 26 boards of directors in advisory roles. Marc Andreesen joined the board in May of 2019. He is a co-founder and general partner at Andreesen Horowitz with 36 portfolio companies and 29 exits. John Buttrick is a partner at Union Square Ventures with one portfolio company. He currently serves on 8 boards of directors in advisory roles. Arjun Sethi joined the board in Autust of 2017. He is a co-founder and partner at Tribe Capital with 47 portfolio companies and 20 exits. Henry Ward is the founder and CEO of Carta with 9 portfolio companies. He currently serves on one board of directors in an advisory role. Manu Kumar is a founder and chief firestarter at K9 Ventures, and co-founder of Carta with 2 portfolio companies and one exit. Devaraj Southworth joined the board in October of 2020. He is co-founder and CEO of Thirstie with 2 portfolio companies. He currently serves on 4 boards of directors in advisory roles.

9. Carta uses a complex array of technologies

The Carta website requires the use of 61 technologies to power its website. This complicated combination of technologies is distributed across 63 technology products and services to ensure that visitors to the website enjoy a smooth and seamless experience. Some of the tech products and services active include jQuery, Google Analytics, HTML5, iPhone Mobile Compatible, Viewport Meta, and several others.

10. The overhead cost for Carta is moderate

When compared to most other businesses of its size, Carta has a moderate overhead expense for IT. While most companies spend at least $70,000 in IT, and some into the millions annually, the projected expense for Carta is just $16.6K for the 2021 year.

11. Carta maintains an edge over the competition

The competition in the FinTech arena is intense, but Carta maintains an edge over its rivals. Carta has secured two registered patents in the computing and calculating category. In addition, the company has secured 6 registered trademarks in the scientific and electric apparatus and instruments category. This means that for 8 products, technologies, or aspects of commercial business, it maintains legal ownership of the intellectual properties and none of its competitors can legally copy or imitate these products or processes. This helps Carta to stand out as being unique among all of the rest of the businesses offering similar services and products.

12. Carta’s website gets a lot of exposure

We also learned that Carta receives a high volume of traffic to its website. The analytics for the site show that over the past 30 days, there has been a total of 706,728 visitors to the site. This has resulted in Carta receiving a ranking of number 61,531 of the millions of websites registered on the world wide web.

13. Carta is the most popular in the United States

Carta is an American company that gets the highest volume of web traffic from people living in the United States. Eighty-two percent of the visitors come from this country. four percent of the visitors are from Canada. Three percent of the website visitors come from India, which shows an increase in the number of monthly visits of 60.75 percent. Visits from the United Kingdom make up one percent of the web traffic with the monthly visit growth increasing by 12.32 percent. One percent of the web traffic is from people living in Israel.

14. Carta is a unicorn

According to Techcrunch, Carta reached unicorn status within seven years of officially launching its products and services commercially. The startup completed a round of Series E funding led by Andreesen Horowitz recently that brought in an additional $300 million in funding. This resulted in a valuation of $1.7 billion. It went beyond the requirement of $1 billion to qualify for inclusion in the exclusive group of unicorn companies. As a result of the funding, Mr. Andreessen joined the Carta board of directors as a significant stakeholder in the company.

15. Carta is a privately owned enterprise

Carta’s leadership has maintained the company as a privately held business. It has not made the move to take the company to the public arena. Instead of securing funding from shareholders in a publicly traded arena, it has opted to go with private investors. For this reason, you won’t find shares of Carta stock listed on any of the public stock exchanges.

16. Carta has secured high investor confidence

Carta is considered a late-stage venture capital-backed company. Remarkably, the startup has attracted the attention and support of so many investors. So far, it has participated in 19 rounds of fundraising. Carta has raised a total of $1.1 billion in funding with the most recent round of Series G funding closing on August 13, 2021, bringing in an extra $300 million. Carta has a total of 76 investors, which is an astronomically high number for a privately held organization. It shows that private investors see Carta as a good bet for receiving a high return on the investments made. Just a few of the dozens of investors include Andreesen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs Principal Strategic Investments, Tribe Capital, Menlo Ventures, Thrive Capital, Tiger Global, Meritech Capital, and dozens of others.

17. Carta continues to expand its services

We also learned that Carta has maintained a steady growth in the products and services it offers to clients. The most recent addition to its offerings includes a fund administration product that is designed for venture capital firms to help them manage portfolio stakes with greater ease. it grants better communications with limited partners and investors. Other new services include portfolio analytics, cash management deal IRRs and more. It also provides tools that help Venture Capital companies to distribute quarterly investor reports as well as tools for integrating with payroll providers and third-party tax businesses. It also provides a platform that allows companies and investors to transfer securities as well as building liquidity.

18. Carta has a massive client base

The Carta platform has become one of the most popular of its kind. It has emerged as a leader in the FinTech industry with groundbreaking technologies that provide an all-in-one platform for financial companies. Currently, the platform works with over 11,000 companies, serving 143 venture firms representing over 700,000 shareholders.

19. Carta is growing its workforce

According to LinkedIn, there are 1,267 employees in the Carta workforce. When looking through the available jobs that are advertised for the business, we noticed that Carta has posted a total of 342 new position openings. This is a big move that will grow the workforce by around 25 percent. New positions are advertised for openings across the United States in California, Washington State, New York, Utah, New Jersey, and in many other places. Carta will soon have a strong presence in every state in the nation.

20. Carta is also moving internationally

We also saw that Carta has job openings outside of the United States. It’s expanding into Singapore, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Sydney, Australia. Carta is moving at a pace that will make it a global enterprise with services and products offered throughout the world. It’s a company to keep your eye on as we see it continuing to grow as a leader in the fintech industry, particularly in the service of venture capital and other financial companies. It has the potential to disrupt the status quo and to change the way that we do business.