Home / Carta pitch deck to raise $150m series-D

Carta Series-D

Pitch Deck Collection

This is the Carta pitch deck to raise $150m series-D in 2019. That $80 million round valued Carta at $800 million post-money.

Carta is building a global ownership management platform to help companies, investors, and employees manage their equity.

Fortunately, Carta have shared their whole deck. Henry Ward writes “I always hate it when people are like, ‘I’ll show this stuff, but the actual important stuff, I want to hide that.”

About

Carta is a SEC-registered transfer agent for private companies that enables seed-stage to pre-IPO companies to manage equity electronically with the participation of their shareholders, employees, auditors, and legal counsel. It digitizes paper stock certificates along with stock options, warrants, and derivatives to create a real-time image of who owns what at a startup.

Carta receives funding from a group of investors, including Draper VC, Expansion VC, k9 Ventures, Elefund, Subtraction Capital, Scott Banister, XG Ventures, Kima Ventures, Andy Palmer, and Structure Capital.

Founded by Manu Kumar and Henry Ward in 2012 as eShares, Carta is based in Mountain View, California.

Henry Ward can’t stop thinking about a question he was asked by an investor years ago: Why is it that when he wants to buy General Electric stock it’s done online in just a couple clicks, but when he invests in two founders in a garage, he gets a paper stock certificate in the mail that takes months to receive?

The backward world of early-stage investment and stock option grants is what Ward, the CEO and co-founder of Carta (known initially as eShares), set out to change in 2012.

Today, Carta provides not only provides electronic securities for employees and investors, but a host of equity management products for private, venture-backed companies.

On Thursday, Carta confirmed it has raised an $80 million Series D funding round — led by Meritech and Tribe Capital — to help expand its product suite even further.

“I don’t know what an inverse of an onion is, but it’s like, the more problems we solve, the more problems we get to solve,” Ward told Business Insider in a recent interview. “It’s like every layer we peel open, we find more gold underneath, so the vision keeps expanding.”

The latest round puts Carta’s valuation at $800 million.

It started with e-shares

When the company started in 2012, it had a different name and a simpler product.

eShares (as it was called) issued electronic stock certificates to employees and investors of privately held companies so that paper stock grants didn’t have to be used. The company rebranded to Carta in 2017 as its product offering outgrew the name.

Carta now offers products like cap table software for startups to better manage the distribution of their equity and 409A valuations for privately held companies to understand how much their shares are worth.

Ward tells us that Carta’s competitors today are mostly people and spreadsheets.

With the latest injection of funding, Carta will expand its offering even further, building out tools for startups to streamline the stock-option process all the way from the inception of a company to IPO and beyond. Carta plans to launch additional products on the investor side as well.

But for the ambitious CEO — who says he always wanted to be involved in a financial infrastructure company, but wasn’t very good “culture fit” at investment banks — the dream is still much larger.

“In the public world there’s so much liquidity. In private world there’s zero,” Ward explained. “It’s hard to think of examples where there’s such an arbitrarily line, where a world that does exactly the same thing functions so differently.”

Over time, Carta hopes to reimagine what it means to hold shares in a privately-held company for both employees and investors — making the buying and selling of stock on a secondary market much more fluid than it is today.

“There are no great companies today that are tackling capital markets, that are truly taking on Wall Street financial infrastructure,” Ward tells us. “We are going to be that company.”

Source: Business Insider and CrunchBase

Funding rounds

Announced Date	Transaction Name	Number of Investors	Money Raised	Lead Investors
Jun 23 2021	Venture Round – Carta	1	—	—
Feb 4 2021	Secondary Market – Carta	2	—	—
Feb 1 2021	Secondary Market – Carta	1	—	—
Nov 23 2020	Series F – Carta	1	—	—
Sep 11 2020	Series F – Carta	1	—	—
May 10 2020	Series F – Carta	7	$180M	Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tribe Capital
May 6 2019	Series E – Carta	17	$300M	Andreessen Horowitz
Dec 27 2018	Series D – Carta	10	$80M	Meritech Capital Partners, Tribe Capital
Apr 18 2018	Series C – Carta	5	$42M	Menlo Ventures, Social Capital
Aug 13 2015	Series-B	8	$17M	Spark Capital
Jan 5 2015	Series A	8	$7M	Union Square Ventures
Aug 1 2012	Seed	13	$1.8M

Pitch deck review summary

Henry said he went through about 54 drafts to get to his pitch deck. They’re a pain and they take time. Also, it takes time to “write a short letter” but I believe this deck is too simple. What Carta does is complicated and they have done a fab job, but the slides are too sparse to live by themselves. This is a great deck to present. I would have a lot of questions if I received it. I’d still take a meeting, but I’d waste Henry’s time to get him to explain the basics.

Structured summary review

Words

There aren’t enough words. Concepts are not explained well.

Slide length

The length is fine, especially since the slides are sparse. There are 23 slides. They could have deleted a few of them and added some more specific slides.

Headers

The is the prototypical example of the Sequoia outline. That’s a bad thing. Headers are key and need to explain the point. Henry grunts out headers.

Appearance

The deck looks great. It really goes to show if you do things simply, you don’t have to mess about.

Narrative

The slides are in the right order. Henry has tried to tell a story, especially with his network effects, but without words, it’s lacking.

Structure

Pretty much all the slides are solid.

Slides

There are “business” slides missing:

Do you get a sense on what their $ value of the market is?
Do you understand how they acquire customers?
How much money do they need and what are they going to do with it?
Do they have competition?
Carta pitch deck

The cover is great. It’s kinda obvious it is an investor pitch though.

The is the prototypical example of the Sequoia outline. This is the best and worst thing to happen to startups. Founders don’t grok that it is a fricking checklist! You need swap “problem” for “Startup cap tables are still done the way they always have been” of whatever.

Now, look at the images. Do you know what is going on? Private and public costs something? I don’t know.

Always start with a slide that explains what you do.

What is the solution? Ok they build a registry. Couldn’t you chuck a bit of a bone and go further?

The content is basis but good for what it is.

I sort of understand what they are saying but the slide is far too minimalist.

This is sort of their one liner.

Does the image really add value? Not really. It would be better to show customer examples so I can understand use cases.

Ok, they are doing a series of slides to explain what they do. Realistically these could all be one slide. It’s not like the images are super informative.

I remember Ward talking about wanting to explain networks. Looking at the slide it is not obvious what the point is.

This is the kind of deck you want to have in a meeting if you are talking to points (which I don’t do). For a deck to send to investors, there should be more information so the deck lives in the wild.

Ward then builds on to show how they build on a network effect. I think the point is that once they get VCs and LPs using Carta as a platform for all their investments they force startups to use Carta. This is funny since Carta is super expensive. I talked to a founder who told me that some VCs put Carta in their term sheet, requiring startups to use it.

I think the point is that they land and expand, or upsell?

I don’t understand. They stay with companies that start with Carta?

The slides aren’t bad, but they are impossible for a third party to understand. I know about cap tables, hell I sell cap tables. So How is that I don’t understand the deck?

Never have interstitial slides in your deck. It should be long enough to need one.

It’s an ok introduction to traction.

Nice slide, but why not write “Our ARR has been growing consistently and 3x per annum”? Add some analysis. It’s not hard.

There is no legend so I don’t know what the green and blue means?

The slides are a bit boring. Why couldn’t they have two per slide?

This is a good slide. I really like they have definitions at the bottom. I have not seen that before.

Some founders are super shady. I heard Revolut allegedly used cumulative revenue instead of their actual revenue at seed.

Very minor point, but I would have started with customers then talked about revenue.

Again, no interstitials.

Why couldn’t this go at the start? “We make ownership as simple as payroll”

Eh, it’s lame as it is. If they showed their percentage of customers per country that would be interesting. Alternatively use it as an expansion slide to show where they plan on going.