Customer security and data protection is always a priority at Carta - this is why we are deprecating our support of TLS 1.1. TLS 1.1 is a HTTP security protocol for your internet browser that was released in 2006 and has known security vulnerabilities.

On July 7th, 2020, Carta will no longer be supporting, or allowing, our customers to access Carta with TLS 1.1.

You may be impacted if you are using a very old browser but can easily resolve the issue by updating your browser to the most up to date version.

Today, Carta is releasing improved workflows for transfers and repurchases.

The new transfer and repurchase workflows have a new look and feel, include user experience improvements, and most importantly, address some of the fundamental challenges around cap table data and reporting for our corporate customers.

Capturing more information for reporting

The new transfer and repurchase workflows will now capture sale information, and in the transfer workflow specifically, changes to beneficial ownership. Capturing this information allows Carta to accurately track changes to disposition and cost basis, which lays the groundwork for features like disqualifying disposition and secondary transaction reports (among other things).

Structuring unstructured data

Both new workflows now allow company administrators to structure their transactional data by tagging transfers and repurchases with specific reasons such as “Buyback” (a repurchase reason) and “Secondary” (a transfer reason). Previously, these were both listed as certificate cancellation reasons and together accounted for close to 20% of all certificate cancellations on Carta.

Transfer reasons:

Repurchase reasons:

Preventing broken cap tables

What wasn’t immediately obvious was that reflecting a buyback as a cancellation or a secondary sale as a cancellation of sold shares followed by an issuance of purchased shares would effectively break the links between certificates in the history of transactionally-related certificates. In other words, customers were unknowingly introducing problems in their cap table data and reports by reflecting transactions using the cancellation tool. More information on this topic can be found in this Carta support article.

Providing a better user experience

We strove to not only address the challenges described above, we also wanted to provide better experience for our company administrators using the transfer and repurchase tools in Carta.

Admins now see the original certificate being transferred or repurchased directly in the workflow:

The “copy from original” button in the transfer workflow saves admins time by copying over the Rule 144 date, Rule 144 reason, and the legend from the original certificate:

Updated support articles for transferring and repurchasing shares can be found in the links below:

• Transfer shares
• Repurchase shares

Today we’re releasing our redesigned email kit. Emails are often the first touch points we have with our users. They should be a clear and helpful experience: users understand the information being communicated, understand who the information is being communicated from, and know what steps to take next via a clear call to action.

While we got some great mileage out of our previous email design kit, our site and its complexity have changed. And it was time for our emails to get with the times. Here are some highlights that our release today will change:

Better compatibility

• Mobile optimized across all screen sizes
• Improved compatibility with Outlook and other email clients

Clearer branding

• Upgraded our co-branding support to display logos of some investor senders using the platform
• Added the Carta logo and simple branded accents that match carta.com

Cleaner UI

• Revamped headings, body text, call to action, etc. Pretty much everything got an upgrade
• Higher contrast to improve readability

Confetti

• Oh yeah, it’s still there 😊🎉

Administrators can now capture tax withholding information for manually entered exercise transactions.

Upon entering an off-platform exercise transaction, administrators will now be presented with initial tax calculations (based on the option holders’ stakeholder address).

From the Equity Awards ledger in the administrative view, select the caret for the option that has been exercised off-platform and select “Exercise Options”:

Note: please make sure that the stakeholder has a stakeholder address populated if you would like to record taxes for a transaction.

When entering exercise information, estimated taxes are shown based on the option holder’s stakeholder address. Administrators can update these tax values.

Clicking review will allow the administrator to confirm and save the transaction and tax information:

Upon saving the transaction, the transaction and tax withholding information will flow through to the Exercised and Settled report. Carta’s reporting can now be used to capture tax withholding for exercises enacted both within and outside the system.

OLD BEHAVIOR:

Prior to this improvement, users trying to terminate a certificate were directed to a support article explaining how to terminate a certificate on separate page.

NEW BEHAVIOR:

With this improvement, users can now click “Terminate stakeholder” which will automatically direct them to the “Terminate Stakeholder” dashboard. From there, users can also access the support article.

Calibration is a fast and efficient way to determine whether any of your investments should be reassessed given the current market conditions and portfolio company performance. Whether your current holdings value was arrived at based on an analysis with market multiples or based on the most recent round of financing, the Calibration tool can provide a high-level picture of how current market conditions may have impacted your portfolio.

Start a report

You can find the Calibration tool in the Firm view under Reports and Documents in the left navigation. Click on the Create report button to get started.

Setup the calibration

Choose the calibration date and select any portfolio companies to include in the report.

Add the details

For each portfolio company, you will need to provide the following information:

• Initial valuation date
• Company value
• LTM revenue as of the initial valuation date
• Company performance since the initial valuation
• LTM revenue as of the calibration date

If you are an ASC 820 subscriber, the tool will automatically populate these data from your most recently completed valuation for each portfolio company. You can also manually add companies not already present your Carta portfolio by clicking on the [+] button in the table.

View the summary report

The Calibration results show the change in value for each portfolio company selected as well as a roll-up summary of the net change in value.

Dive into company results

Click on a portfolio company in the report summary page to see details about the calibration. You can also fine tune the results by changing the selected quartile used to calculate the calibrated company value.

An email from Carta is often the first interaction we have with our users—and we aim to make this first impression a great one. That doesn’t mean we need to be splashy. Rather, it means we want to provide clear information to our users that helps them understand what Carta is and how we can help them manage their assets and equity. For users who’ve been with us a while, we hope these emails continue to reflect the high quality or our software and services.

Carta last updated its emails in November 2017. We’ve changed a lot since then, and we’ve learned a lot, too. In one week, we will release a revamped version of our emails that we hope solve some problems that our users and data helped us identify as well as better reflect our brand today. Today, we’re giving you a preview of what those changes will look like:

We’ve said hello to many employees, companies, investors, board members, law firms, and others around the world the past few years. We think these emails will help us say hello even better going forward.

We’ve released an improvement to allow stakeholders who submitted an exercise request to be able to see up-to-date information on the status of their exercise request and payment. These details can be found on the Exercises tab of the option grant modal. Once a company administrator approves the exercise request, the detailed payment steps will be shown.

ACH Payment Steps

Exercises paid via ACH will show three payment steps:

• Transfer of funds from the stakeholder’s account
• Confirmation of the funds at Carta
• Transfer of the funds to the company’s account

Where applicable, expected completion dates will be shown.
If there is an issue with the payment, description of the issue and next steps are provided.

Offline Wire Steps

Exercises paid via offline wire transfer will show two payment steps:

• Confirmation of funds sent (provided by the stakeholder)
• Confirmation of the funds received (provided by the company)

CCL borrowers and Fund Admin can now submit compliance certificates in-app.

On a quarterly and annual basis, CCL borrowers must certify that they are in compliance with all required covenants in their Loan & Security Agreement by submitting a compliance certificate.

A Fund Admin (Operator) can complete the certificate and submit to the Borrower (Signer) for signature. A Borrower can either sign these submitted forms or fill one out, sign, and submit directly. Both an Operator and a Signer can retract unsigned compliance certificates (e.g. certificate was filled out in error or is no longer applicable).

Carta requires that every security should have a stakeholder with a valid relationship. To further ensure the accuracy of reports, “Relationship” and “Effective date” will now be required every time we add new stakeholders or edit an existing stakeholder. You can add one or multiple relationships for a stakeholder.

Add Stakeholder Modal:

Edit Stakeholder Modal:

When you go to the edit stakeholder modal, you will now see all existing relationships for the stakeholder. You can add additional relationships or edit existing relationships both in this modal and in the “Edit stakeholder properties” modal.