What is Carta? Carta Review, Features

Carta provides electronic equity management services for seed-stage companies, including shareholders, employees, auditors, and legal advisors. At the same time, it digitizes paper stock certificates, stock options, warrants, and derivatives, and provides online equity transactions.

About Carta

Carta, formerly known as eShares, Inc., DBA Carta, Inc., was founded in 2012 by Manu Kumar and Henry Ward and is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA. It is a private company equity transfer agency registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Carta's Products

• In terms of product services, the platform business is based on the equity structure table, which is used to conduct online equity trading, real-time data updates, analysis report generation (such as ASC 178), various legal valuations (such as 409A), and other businesses, forming a complete equity management system.

• In terms of customer development, Carta adopts a partnership system to attract accountants, lawyers and venture capitalists to join the Carta platform. The platform gives certain business benefits to partners and referral companies. As a professional equity transaction intermediary, Carta has established a unified operating platform for private companies, listed companies and investors, lawyers, and accountants, allowing private equity to flow on a transparent, efficient and open platform.

• Currently, Carta has 9 offices in the United States, Canada, and Brazil, and has helped more than 900,000 shareholders manage more than $800 billion in equity. More than 14,000 companies, more than 900,000 investors, law firms, and employees use the Carta platform.

Founding Background

The inspiration for founding Carta came during a dinner party when Henry Ward and Manu Kumar were having dinner at a Thai restaurant. Kumar thought that buying shares of a listed company was very easy, but investing in a private company was extremely cumbersome and required a lot of time and energy to read paper documents. It was just such a seemingly ordinary sentence that made Henry Ward, who was very sensitive to the market, see the business opportunity, and thus the private enterprise equity management platform Carta was born.