Carta and NewView partner, hoping to entice more startups to let employees sell shares early
A new program wants to encourage more startups to allow workers to cash out early by making it easier to transact tender offers.
Startups are increasingly extending their private lifespans, leaving staff with stock compensation that lacks early liquidity. To address this, several late-stage startups are now offering tender options to their employees. This allows employees - and sometimes early investors - to sell a portion of their shares at a fixed price to an approved investor.
To streamline the tender process, NewView recently teamed up with Carta. The partnership merges NewView's expertise in secondary deal structuring with Carta's equity platform. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, sees this collaboration as a means to facilitate startups' management of liquidity programs. He envisions it as a "win-win-win" scenario for employees, companies, and investors.
According to a recent study by NewView and Carta, tender offers for Series C and beyond startups are projected to triple over the past three years. Moreover, these startups are no longer limited to the most valuable private firms like OpenAI, Databricks, or Anduril. For example, last year, NewView led a tender for HighTouch, a marketing customization startup valued at $1.3 billion, during its seventh year of operation.
However, the actual number of startups initiating tender offers remains modest, with only 44 executed in the first half of 2026. Viswanathan urges more startups to explore tender offers, describing them as effective retention tools and morale enhancers. In the past, being a unicorn was sufficient to attract talent, but with numerous billion-dollar companies now available, this may not be as enticing.
Offering a tender, Viswanathan explained, "grants employees liquidity along their journey with the company." Some companies that have recently conducted tender offers include AI customer support startup Decagon, self-driving tech developer Wayve, and AI voice generator ElevenLabs, which carried out two such offerings within a year.
Viswanathan notes that startups are staying private for 12 to 15 years, a trend unlikely to change. In this period, ensuring employee liquidity becomes crucial to prevent talent from moving to public companies.
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