Non-US, private companies in supported regions now have the ability to enable exercising workflows for their optionholders. Optionholders can access wire payment instructions within Carta after exercise approval to send funds directly to the company.

Who this affects:

• 🇰🇾   private Cayman Island companies
• 🇨🇦   private Canadian companies
• 🌐   + more locations in the future! 

What's new: 

• Supported non-US, private companies can enable offline wire exercising, allowing their optionholders to initiate and track an exercise request within the Carta platform. 
• Company admins can manage payment instructions that are provided to optionholders after an exercise is approved. 
• Company admins can toggle exercisability on and off, as well as select which grant types are exercisable.

Action required: 

• Company admins must visit the Transaction Settings page to enable exercising
• Companies must have a valid fair market value (FMV)

Resources: 

• Support article: Exercise workflow for optionholders
• Support article: Overview of option exercising via the offline wire exercise workflow

What's New:

• Preferred shareholders can now request ownership details (like fully diluted share count or detailed cap table information) when they accept certificates. Previously this request action was available only after the stakeholder's account had been set up and a security accepted. This change helps empower company admins to set the correct respective access levels for investors more effectively. This helps both companies and their investors get the most out of the Carta platform with clearer information sharing workflows.
• The information management workflow for companies remains the same. Company admins can still select the appropriate level of data sharing access for each stakeholder. For our summary of these levels, we've detailed them here.

Accept screen for preferred shareholders accepting preferred shares:

We will be rolling out these changes during the week of November 2nd. 

What’s coming: Admins can now upload new stakeholder information using data stored in custom spreadsheets/reports 

Who this affects: All companies 

What’s better:

For companies that use HR Providers to store their stakeholder/employee information, their company admins can now upload new hire information into Carta in bulk using the HR Provider's report (xls, or xlsx) with minimal modifications.

This workflow is an enhancement to the existing Bulk Add Stakeholders flow, with a new step for users to map the columns in the report to Carta data fields.

Timing: Live for all customers Oct 20.

We've listened to your feedback on watermark styling obstructing the readability of the documents and we've made a few changes to address those concerns. We'll continue to iterate on our watermarking capabilities and tools in the coming months and we are starting with the following changes.

Here's a sample document with the old watermark styling

Here's the same sample document with the new watermark styling

Specifically, we've made the following changes with this iteration:

• Reduced opacity of the watermark text
• Updated alignment between the rows
• Fewer repetition
  
  

Who these changes affect?
All Carta users who choose to apply watermark on their documents. These changes will be rolling out to all users today.

Recently, we've made updates to the Rule 701 worksheet to improve the calculation methodologies. Here are a few changes we hope you'll find useful.

1. Ability to a reporting date range - regardless of whether your company uses a rolling or fixed reporting period for Rule 701, you have full control over the securities to include in the report. By default, we show a 12 month rolling period. Change dates to review historical data or model out future issuances.

2. Report calculation methodology detailed -

• We do not include canceled or expired securities in our Rule 701 check
  • Securities that are canceled as part of a transfer or repurchase will remain included in the report
    • The resulting balance certificates from the transfer or repurchase stock are excluded
• Common certificates resulting from the exercise or settlement of Rule 701 equity awards are included
  • The exercised portion of the equity award is moved from ‘Common shares issuable upon exercise of Rule 701 option grants/RSUs’ to ‘Common shares issued under Rule 701’ to avoid double counting and enable accurate tracking of Rule 701 shares after an exercise.
• The aggregate sales price for RSUs is set to the FMV value at grant
• We define outstanding shares as securities that were not issued under Rule 701

What's new

• Custom reporting - set filter criteria and add, edit, and remove data columns
• Preview of ledger-based reports
• Unified reporting page - see Carta-provided reports and your custom reports

How you can access the experience

In the last few months, we've been introducing a new reporting experience and the ability to create custom reports. We hope this update will help you become more efficient in exporting the Carta data you need, in the format you need. If this experience is enabled for your company, you'll be able to access the page by clicking on Capitalization > Reporting in the top menu.

From top of the classic reporting page, you'll see a banner allow you to switch between the new and old reporting pages.

Once you've landed on the new page, you always have the option to head back to the classic reporting page at any time, by using the banner in the top navigation.

How to run a Carta-provided report

From this new page, you'll be able to access the same reports that you are familiar with. For example, clicking on the cap table report will surface a modal, allowing you to input the parameters necessary to generate the report

Some reports now support in-app preview and customization, these are denoted by a purple customizable badge. Clicking on the report name brings you directly to the report preview. You're able to adjust parameters, see the filters applied, and a preview of the data before exporting the report.

Customizing a report

You can make modifications to this report and save it as a custom report by clicking Copy and edit in the top navigation. From here you can make adjustments to filtering criteria and add, remove, or reorder columns.

Once you're happy with your changes, you can Save and run the report or export it to share.

Who this affects: Investors with company investments on Carta

What's new: Investors can now see and add tags inline on our Company Investments page. This will allow users to filter their investments by tags.

How it works:

Tags are completely customizable. Users create a tag category and then add a the tags relevant to their investment strategy.

To see all tags for each investment, hover over the tags column.

To add new tags to an investment, users click the "edit tags" button. They can then search their tags or add a completely new tag.

In an aim to make exercising simple and easy to understand, we are excited to support simulation tools on iOS and Android apps.

This release will allow any option holder on iOS or Android app to view the estimated cost and taxes by simulating an exercise before performing it. 

There are three different scenarios available through the simulator depending on the type of the grant(s).

• All Vested Options
• Early Exercise all Options
• Customize your exercise

While All Vested Options and Early Exercise All Options allow users to simulate a fixed number of options based on the selected date, Customize your Exercise allows users to manually enter the number of options they plan on exercising.

Once the preferred scenario is selected and additional tax information has been provided, the cost and taxes for that exercise are calculated.

Goal: Allow users to merge their portfolios and view holdings in one view.

Audience: 

• Users: Equity holder, Employees, Investors (Corporations), Investors (Fund Admin), LP
• Companies on Launch, Starter, and Growth 
• Platforms: Web, iOS and Android

What’s New: Users will now be able to merge multiple portfolios into a single one using the self-serve portfolio merge tool.

• Organization: Organize and view different company holdings in a single portfolios 
• Customization: Customize portfolio views by selecting which portfolios to merge

Timing: Rolled out on 09.24.2020

Resources: https://support.carta.com/s/article/merging-portfolios

Corporations  Early Access 

Carta now supports performance awards with variable payouts

What’s New: Here are the highlights for Carta’s updated performance award module.

• Manage performance awards from a single, unified modal
• Support variable payouts
• Streamline award management with updated UX
• Updates to vesting modals for admins and participants
• (Coming soon) Custom vesting schedules with performance conditions
• (Coming soon) Milestone vesting with performance conditions

Manage performance awards from a single module

Carta’s new performance award functionality allows administrators to manage performance criteria and payout from a single module. Performance criteria can be created and applied to multiple vesting schedules and many grants at once. Awards sharing the same performance criteria are all managed from a payout perspective from a single action:

Support variable payouts

Carta now supports variable payouts for performance awards. Performance awards can be configured to allow for payouts at greater than or less than 100% of target. 

Note: Carta will initially reserve shares from the plan’s share pool at the maximum payout amount.

Streamline award management with updated UX

Performance conditions can now be created and tied to vesting tranches:

Performance conditions now can have both variable (pay out at greater than or less than 100%) or non variable payouts. Performance conditions can be attached to multiple vesting schedules; achievement is governed by managing the condition itself and flows back to all affected tranches for vesting:

The performance condition(s) are then tied to a vesting schedule or individual vesting tranches:

Associating grants with a performance vesting schedule will allow administrators to manage condition achievement by evaluating the condition itself. Performance tranches on the award will not pay out until the related performance criteria are achieved: 

Updates to vesting modal for admins and participants

Prior to achievement of a performance condition, the vesting modal will show no shares vested for tranches tied to performance conditions. The progress table will indicate the performance condition that is tied to each tranche, and will show the potential amount that can be earned. 

Following the evaluation of the condition, tranches that have met both the time and performance conditions will show as vested and will allow exercise (if options) or release (if RSUs). The following screenshot shows the condition “Liquidity Event” as achieved on 9/16/2020, allowing the tranches that have met both the time and performance based conditions to vest: 

Coming soon

While this initial release covers performance awards and standard vesting templates, we will soon release additional functionality. This includes the ability to associate performance conditions with custom vesting templates and schedules, as well as combining performance conditions with milestone vesting events. An upcoming entry will cover these items.