NewView and Carta Partner to Improve Stock Liquidity for Startup Workers

Startup employees who receive stock as part of their compensation often face long waits before they can cash it out. This is changing as NewView and Carta team up to make it easier for companies to allow staff to sell a portion of their shares before an exit. The key to this change is the use of tender offers, a method that lets employees and early investors sell some of their shares at a fixed price to an approved buyer. More late-stage companies are adopting this approach as the time until public listings or acquisitions continues to grow.

The new partnership brings together NewView's experience in structuring secondary deals with Carta's equity platform. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, says the goal is to help startups run liquidity programs more smoothly. He encourages founders to think of early liquidity as a 'win-win-win' for employees, companies, and investors. According to a recent study by NewView Capital and Carta, the use of tender offers is on the rise. Over the past three years, the number of these offers among Series C and later-stage startups has grown threefold.

The practice is expanding beyond the most valuable private firms, such as OpenAI, Databricks, or Anduril. As an example, Hightouch, a marketing customization startup, had NewView lead a tender for the company at a $1.3 billion valuation when it was seven years old. Even so, the practice is not yet widespread. The same research found that only 44 tender offers were executed in the first half of 2026, a small share of eligible startups. Viswanathan wants to increase that number, calling tenders strong retention tools and morale boosters.

He argues that the standard recruiting pitch has also lost some of its force. A decade ago, reaching unicorn status was enough to attract talent, he said, but the label carries less weight today. A tender, in his view, is an opportunity to say you will also get liquidity in your journey with us. Recent companies to hold tender offers include Decagon, an AI customer support startup; Wayve, which develops self-driving technology; and ElevenLabs, an AI voice generator that carried out two such offerings in under a year. Viswanathan said the longer timelines are unlikely to reverse. We need to make sure that there is liquidity for the employees, he added, to prevent a talent drain from high-quality venture-backed companies to their public counterparts.