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Carta and NewView Capital announced a partnership this week to streamline tender offers that let startup employees sell a portion of their private‑company shares early. The collaboration merges NewView’s experience structuring secondary‑market deals with Carta’s equity‑management platform, giving CEOs a single tool to launch and run liquidity programs. The firms said the service is now live for companies that want to offer early cash to workers while remaining private.

Startups are staying private longer, often for 12 to 15 years, leaving staff with stock that cannot be sold until an IPO or acquisition. That lack of liquidity has become a growing pain point as more employees take a sizable slice of their compensation in equity. To address the gap, an increasing number of late‑stage firms are turning to tender offers, which let employees and early investors sell shares at a set price to an approved buyer. A study by NewView and Carta shows tender offers for Series C and later companies have tripled over the past three years, though only 44 deals were executed in the first half of 2026.

The partnership already has concrete examples. NewView helped arrange a tender for Hightouch, a marketing‑customization startup valued at $1.3 billion, and recent offers have been filed by AI customer‑support firm Decagon, self‑driving tech developer Wayve, and voice‑AI company ElevenLabs, which ran two tenders within a year. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, says the goal is to make tenders a “win‑win‑win” for workers, companies, and investors, and to use them as retention tools that boost morale when a unicorn label no longer guarantees talent.

If the combined platform lowers the administrative burden, more private firms may follow the trend. Viswanathan argues that without early liquidity, high‑quality talent could drift to public‑market competitors. By making tender offers easier to design and manage, Carta and NewView hope to keep employees invested in their companies’ long‑term journeys while giving founders a new lever to attract and retain staff. The partnership could reshape how private tech firms address compensation and talent retention in the years ahead.