Carta and NewView Capital have teamed up to encourage more startups to offer tender offers, enabling employees to sell shares early. Due to startups staying private for longer periods, employees often find themselves with stock compensation that they cannot liquidate for years. Tender offers allow employees and early investors to sell a portion of their shares at a set price to designated investors, providing earlier liquidity. This partnership aims to simplify the process by combining NewView's expertise in secondary market deal structuring with Carta's equity management platform.

Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner at NewView, describes the collaboration as a way to help startups efficiently launch and manage tender programs, framing early liquidity options as beneficial for employees, companies, and investors alike. Over the past three years, tender offers have tripled among Series C and later-stage startups, according to a joint study by NewView and Carta. Notably, tender offers are expanding beyond the largest private companies like OpenAI and Databricks, including firms such as Hightouch, which recently held a tender offer at a $1.3 billion valuation.

Despite the growth, the overall number of startups implementing tender offers remains modest, with only 44 executed in the first half of 2026 in their dataset. Viswanathan emphasizes that tender offers serve as valuable retention tools and morale boosters, helping startups compete for talent by offering liquidity during what can be a 12- to 15-year private company lifespan. Highlighted examples of startups holding such offers recently include AI customer support firm Decagon, autonomous vehicle developer Wayve, and AI voice generator ElevenLabs.

The partnership is designed to address challenges faced by founders when considering tender offers, often seen as complex and burdensome. With more companies recognizing that unicorn status alone no longer guarantees talent retention, offering liquidity through tender offers is pitched as a competitive advantage. This trend is expected to continue as startups seek ways to maintain strong employee engagement amid longer journeys to public markets or major liquidity events.