The repurchase workflow will no longer remind users to terminate the stakeholder if the stakeholder’s already been terminated in Carta.

Unvested shares from equity grants are typically repurchased from stakeholders once they’ve been terminated in Carta. The recently released repurchase workflow was reminding users to terminate the stakeholder even if the stakeholder was already terminated in Carta. We’ve updated the workflow so that the blue reminder text and “Terminate stakeholder” button only appear if the stakeholder to which the certificate belongs hasn’t yet been terminated in Carta.

Thank you to the Carta admin users who reached out and provided this product feedback. Please continue reaching out and letting us know how we can make the product better for our corporate customers.

Carta public company administrators can now view and approve exercises through our public company exercise ledger.

Carta’s public company exercise ledger and public company RSU settlement tool can now be found under Transactions.

While administrators will still be able to approve exercises via Tasks, this new ledger gives a consolidated view of pending and approved exercises.

Start by clicking on Transactions and select Exercises:

The administrator is led to a ledger containing exercises to be approved. These include cashless type exercises as well as cash exercises.

Clicking the righthand caret will bring up the approval and tax review flow:

From here, the admin is able to review/update taxes if necessary, and approve the exercise.

Carta now automatically populates the Rule 144 date for certificates issued as a result of an exercise.

For Carta’s corporate customers domiciled in the United States, Carta will automatically set the Rule 144 date for certificates issued as a result of an exercise to be the recorded date of the exercise.

For more information about the Rule 144 date, check out the Rule 144 date support article in the Carta Support Center.

This is a simple improvement that will save time for Carta users and applies to exercises completed on Carta using our online exercising feature as well as any off-platform exercises reflected using our offline exercise workflow.

A special thank you from Carta’s product teams goes out to Carta’s law firm users for recommending this improvement.

Keep them coming!

Goal: Create a cohesive, consistent, and transparent payment experience for US private company admins and employees

Audience: Private company admins and employees

What’s new:

Increased transparency on money movement status:

You can access the new Payment Information page two ways:

Employees:  Account -->Payment Information

Company: Company--> Settings--> Payment information

One place for all cash balances:

Cash Balance shows net funds in your Carta Cash balance account. It accounts for pending deposit and pending withdrawal.

Increased flexibility when adding bank accounts:

You can now add multiple bank accounts to your payment accounts page.You can access payment accounts from both the payments information page and from the option exercise flow in the web experience.

You can also connect your bank account instantly via Plaid. If you do not see your bank account listed in Plaid, you can still connect bank accounts manually.

Better payment tracking and record keeping:

You can now see payment history for your payments made for an exercise. For each payment received at Carta, we provide two legs of the transaction: Funds received from source account to your Carta cash balance account and funds sent from your Carta cash balance account to the destination account. We also provide the status of those funds along with estimated timelines.

We’re releasing an update to the iOS and Android apps to support Options Exercising via Wire transfer! International option holders of private US companies can exercise through Carta via wire transfer. When a company enables this feature, option holders can initiate and track their exercises within Carta and pay for their exercise via wire transfer.

To begin, you will need:

• An ISO, NSO, or ISO/NSO split option grant

Once you’ve installed the latest version of the Carta app, you can head to the option grant that you intend to exercise. If exercising is available, you can tap on the “Exercise” button to begin.

Confirm your country of residence to help guide you through the appropriate exercising steps. It is recommended that you consult with a tax professional or personal financial advisor before exercising to help determine if exercising is right for you.

Once you confirm your country of residence, you’ll now be able to:

• Choose the number of option grants you want to exercise
• View the payment information required for your exercise
• Ensure that your portfolio profile information is up to date

Once you’ve fulfilled all of the requirements needed for exercising, ensure that you read the terms of your exercise. You can do this by reviewing all linked documents before submission. Once you’re ready to submit an exercise request, tap the “Exercise” button.

After you submit your request, the issuing company will approve your exercise. Your company’s approval will then allow you to access wire instructions within Carta via the ‘Wire funds’ task in-app, or through your email.

Once payment has been confirmed by the company, a certificate will be created. This certificate will be signed by the officers and sent for you to accept. You’ll receive email updates from us as your option exercise progresses.

Note: Carta does not wire funds. A wire transfer must be completed outside of Carta, and through your banking provider.

Limited Partners (LPs) on Carta have a brand new onboarding experience.

Our investor clients depend on Carta to communicate with their LPs. Over the past few months, we’ve made big improvements to the ways LPs use Carta with a new navigation system, updates to make documents easier to find, and our Fund Investment overview page, which combines data across Carta so that LPs can understand all of their fund investments at once.

Today, we’re continuing to improve the LP experience by making their first experience on the portal simple and delightful. The biggest change is that LPs no longer need to accept their fund commitments and their fund investments are shown automatically inside their portfolio.

Here’s what it looks like:

First, LPs are welcomed to Carta with an email letting them know that they have a new investment on the portal and asking them to create an account. For LPs that already have an account, we’ll automatically put this investment in their portfolio.

Once an LP creates their account, they’ll go directly to that portfolio. There they can see any existing investments in funds or companies as well as their new investment. For new investments, they’ll see an overview of the investment so far, and be asked to agree to electronic communication for each fund investment.

When an LP agrees to electronic communication, we’ll celebrate with them!

Their account is now fully active. They can see any documents or fund information that has been shared with them.

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.