Carta and NewView Bet on the Secondary Market to Stem Talent Drain
AI-generated image · US National Wire
A new partnership aims to normalize tender offers for late-stage startups, but the low adoption rate suggests founders are still hesitant to open the exit door early.
The pitch is simple: if you can't take your company public, let your employees cash out some chips.
As TechCrunch first reported, Carta has partnered with NewView Capital to streamline the process of tender offers—transactions where employees and early investors sell a portion of their shares to approved investors at a set price. Ravi Viswanathan, the founder and managing partner of NewView, argues that this is a "win-win-win" for investors, companies, and workers.
**Opinion:** From where I sit, the "win" is debatable. While Viswanathan frames this as a morale booster, facilitating early exits can often be a quiet admission that the massive, life-changing IPO exit is further off than promised. When founders start prioritizing liquidity programs, it often signals a shift from growth-at-all-costs to damage control for retention.
Viswanathan tells TechCrunch that the necessity for these programs stems from the fact that companies are remaining private for 12 to 15 years. He notes that while unicorn status used to be a primary talent magnet a decade ago, it is no longer sufficient. To prevent a "talent drain" toward public companies, Viswanathan suggests that tender offers allow CEOs to prove that liquidity is possible during the journey.
Data provided by NewView and Carta indicates that tender offers for Series C and later-stage startups have increased threefold over the last three years. Viswanathan points out that these offers are no longer reserved for the industry giants like Anduril, Databricks, or OpenAI. He cites Hightouch, a marketing customization startup and NewView portfolio company, which conducted a tender offer last year at a $1.3 billion valuation. Other companies recently utilizing these offers include AI voice generator ElevenLabs (which held two in under a year), self-driving developer Wayve, and AI customer support startup Decagon.
Despite the push, the actual adoption remains marginal. TechCrunch reports that according to the NewView and Carta dataset, only 44 tender offers were executed in the first half of 2026. While the infrastructure is being built to make these deals more seamless, the low volume suggests that most founders are still unwilling to let their team off the hook—or perhaps they are still betting on a windfall that justifies the wait.