Carta and NewView Partner to Make Early Employee Liquidity Easier for Startups

TL;DR

• Carta and NewView Capital have partnered to offer startups a streamlined, lower-cost tender offer program that lets employees sell a portion of their vested shares early.
• The program combines Carta's cap table and tender infrastructure with NewView's capital for secondaries, targeting Series B to Series D startups struggling with talent retention.
• The move signals a broader shift toward routine early liquidity becoming standard practice in private markets, not just a pre-IPO perk.

A New Playbook for Startup Liquidity

For years, early liquidity at startups was the exception, not the rule. Employees joined high-growth companies, waited seven to ten years for an IPO, and hoped their equity would eventually be worth something. That model is breaking down.

This week, equity management platform Carta and secondary-focused investment firm NewView Capital announced a new partnership designed to change that. The joint program makes it dramatically easier for startups to run tender offers — structured events where employees can sell a portion of their vested shares to outside investors before an IPO or acquisition.

Instead of spending months navigating legal, tax, and investor hurdles, founders can now launch a tender through Carta's platform with NewView as a ready buyer. The goal: make early liquidity routine, even for companies as early as Series B.

How the Program Works

At its core, the partnership removes the two biggest barriers to tender offers: complexity and finding capital.

Traditionally, a tender offer required a startup to hire outside counsel, coordinate between its board and existing investors, set a valuation, and then hunt for a buyer willing to purchase employee shares. The process could take six months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, putting it out of reach for all but late-stage unicorns.

Under the new program, Carta provides the infrastructure. The company already manages cap tables for more than 40,000 startups, and it has built a dedicated tender offer workflow that handles shareholder eligibility, disclosures, pricing, compliance, and fund distribution.

NewView Capital provides the demand. The Burlingame-based firm, which spun out of New Enterprise Associates in 2018 to focus exclusively on secondaries and buyouts of venture-backed companies, will serve as an anchor buyer for eligible tenders.

Startups in the program can choose to run company-sponsored tenders of $5 million and up, a much lower threshold than the $30 million to $50 million typically seen in the market. Carta says the end-to-end timeline can be cut to as little as three to four weeks. Companies can also set parameters around who is eligible, how much they can sell — typically 10 to 20 percent of vested holdings — and whether to include former employees.

Why Early Liquidity Matters Now

The timing is no accident. After the 2021 boom and the 2022-2023 IPO freeze, startup employees have grown skeptical of equity compensation. Private companies are staying private longer — the median time to IPO is now over 10 years — while higher interest rates and cost-of-living pressures have made paper wealth far less appealing.

For founders, that has turned into a talent crisis. Recruiting top engineers and go-to-market leaders is hard enough. Retaining them for four-plus years without giving them a way to realize any value is even harder.

Early liquidity solves multiple problems at once. For employees, it provides life-changing money to buy a home, pay off student loans, or simply de-risk their financial situation without quitting and forfeiting unvested shares. For employers, it boosts retention, morale, and recruiting power, especially when competing against public tech giants offering liquid RSUs.

Carta CEO Henry Ward has long argued that illiquidity is a feature that hurts innovation. NewView Partner Ravi Viswanathan has echoed that view, noting that secondaries allow great companies to reward loyal teams without being forced into a premature IPO.

What It Means for Private Market Secondaries

The Carta-NewView partnership is also a bet on the explosive growth of private market secondaries.

Secondary transaction volume hit record highs in 2024 and 2025, surpassing $160 billion industry-wide, as LPs, GPs, and employees all sought liquidity. Tender offers have become one of the fastest-growing segments, with companies like Stripe, Databricks, and OpenAI running multi-billion dollar programs to retain staff.

What was once reserved for decacorns is now moving downmarket. By lowering the minimum deal size and standardizing the process, Carta and NewView are effectively opening up tender offers to hundreds of mid-stage startups that were previously locked out.

If successful, the program could normalize twice-yearly or annual liquidity events, much like public company stock vesting. Other secondary firms and crossover funds are likely to follow with similar turnkey offerings, increasing competition and potentially driving up pricing for employee shares.

What to Watch Next

The partnership is rolling out now to select Carta customers in the U.S., with a broader launch expected in early 2027. Key questions remain around valuation methodology, particularly for AI startups with rapidly changing 409A valuations, as well as tax implications for sellers.

Founders interested in the program will need board approval and will have to balance employee selling with signaling risk — too much insider selling can spook prospective investors.

Still, the message to the ecosystem is clear: the era of waiting a decade to get paid for startup work is ending. Early, structured liquidity is becoming a competitive advantage, not a sign of trouble.

AndroGuider Team

Articles written by the AndroGuider team. We try to make them thorough and informational while being easy to read.