Data is critical for founders to make informed decisions when fundraising and hiring. We are now offering early stage founders benchmark insights on early stage rounds and first engineering and marketing hires. 

What’s new?

A centralized hub makes it easier for founders to access and interact with fundraising and hiring benchmarks.

Fundraise insights provides information on early stage SAFE and priced round market terms and how they compare to other companies in related stages, regions, and industries.

• Percentiles for company valuations over the last year
• Median cash raised per round over the last year
• Calculations of the dilution on your cap table based on market round terms

Hiring insights provides information on how much to pay early marketing and engineering hires.

• Option pool size across seed, Series A, and Series B companies
• Percentage of total company equity in initial 4-year grant
• Available for New York/San Francisco.
  
  *More job areas, levels, and locations are available on Carta Total Compensation

Why this matters:

These updates enable founders to navigate fundraising and hiring strategies with precision and insight. This resource enables founders to make data-driven decisions and strategically plan for their company's growth, optimize their fundraising strategies and ensure their hiring packages are competitive, setting their teams up for success.

How can I access it?

Market Insights is available on all Carta plans. Find it under Essentials>View market insights. For more information visit our support article.

Investors can now refer their portfolio companies to get QSBS Attestations from Carta.

The feature allows investors to do this for individual companies or multiple companies that are likely QSBS eligible. Once you refer your portfolio company, they will receive a notification on Carta encouraging them to get a QSBS Attestation. After a company receives the QSBS Attestation, you will receive an email and copy of a QSBS Attestation letter addressed to your firm highlighting which securities held are QSBS eligible. 

What do I need to do?

This feature is available to users who are admins for an investment firm on Carta. Navigate to the 'Investments' page of your firm where you can refer in bulk or individual companies for QSBS reviews from Carta.  If you have any questions reach out to your assigned Carta account team or qsbs@carta.com to learn more!

What’s new?

We are launching an updated version of our Equity Refresh Planner to better help with:

1. Identifying which employees receive a grant
2. Deciding the size of each refresh grant based on market benchmarks 

This updated tool includes:

1. The ability to add/remove employees to your company’s Refresh Plan
2. Quick filters to quickly identify eligible and/or High Retention risk employees based on tenure, your compensation plan, and market targets.
3. Settings to help manage the refresh grant recommendation and tenure eligibility criteria

How can I access the new Equity Refresh planner?

1. Navigate to the Reports page in Carta Total Compensation
2. Navigate to the “Equity Refresh” tile and click “View report” 
3. The interactive planner will open

How do I use the Advanced Equity Refresh planner? 

This planner helps companies identify employees who should be considered for additional equity grants as a way to retain talent at the company. It also provides market based refresh grant recommendations that can be adjusted as needed.

Questions?

If you have any questions about this new planner, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

What's new?

As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance accuracy and reliability, we have transitioned our Canceled and Returned report to Carta's Equity Reporting Suite service.

What does the new report offer?

• Consistent Date Formatting: All date columns are now displayed as MM/DD/YYYY for consistency across reports.
• Standardized Security ID Field: The "Security ID" field is now uniformly formatted across all new reports, facilitating easier reconciliation.
• Uniform Quantity Columns: All quantity-related columns, including "Quantity Issued," "Quantity Canceled," "Quantity Forfeited," "Quantity Repurchased," and "Quantity Transferred," are now displayed consistently to simplify reconciliation.
• Detailed Transaction Type Field: The new "Transaction Type" field replaces the old "Reason for Cancellation" field. This new field offers more detailed transaction discrimination and resolves previous issues with reconciling shares returning due to grant life expiration (now tracked under "Lifetime Ended"). It also tracks options canceled due to repricing.
• Termination Date: A new "Termination Date" field has been added to further streamline reconciliations.

How can I access it?

To access the new Canceled and Returned report, click on Run reports under Essentials or navigate to Cap table and select Run reports.

Where can I learn more?

For more information on Carta's equity reports, please refer to our dedicated support article.

Fund Admin customers with portfolio companies using Carta's QSBS Attestation product will now see a QSBS tag on the SOI for investments that have been attested to as QSBS eligible by Carta Tax and Valuations team.

The tag indicates that your fund holds shares that are QSBS eligible (pending the holding period requirement). To see more details about your QSBS eligible shares you can click on the investment and navigate to the Holdings page and select 'QSBS eligible shares'.

Here you can view more information including: number of eligible shares, securities that are eligible, and download a PDF of the personalized QSBS Attestation letter.

What do I need to do?

This page is available to customers using Carta for Fund Administration. You can navigate to your Fund's SOI on Carta by selecting "choose entity" on your firm's account, selecting the fund you wish to view, and selecting "Investments" in the navigation menus.

If you have any questions reach out to your assigned Carta account team or qsbs@carta.com to learn more!

Investors can now request access to their QSBS Attestation letter from portfolio companies using the QSBS product.

This feature allows you see which of your portfolio companies has received a QSBS Attestation by Carta, and allow you to request access to your QSBS Attestation letter for your eligible securities.

What do I need to do?

This feature is available to users who are admins for an investment firm on Carta. To find your QSBS eligible investments, visit your 'Investments' page and filter to the QSBS eligible investments.

If you have any questions reach out to your assigned Carta account team or qsbs@carta.com to learn more!

Starting today, Carta is enabling you to easily determine how much equity to grant employees and when to grant it via new tools such as the Hiring Planner, Refresh Grant Planner, and Equity Pool Forecast.

Only Carta can help you: 

• Minimize manual work using a single platform
• Take a proactive approach to thinking about impacts of equity grants on your equity pool
• Conduct accurate forecasting using integrated benchmarks from Carta Total Compensation

What’s new?

With our new suite of Employee management tools, administrators have access to four new features:

1. Manage Employees hub: See the tools, required steps, and resources to help you hire, manage and retain your team.
2. Hiring Planner: Add potential new hires to see recommended equity and cash compensation based on market data, and export plans to share with your team and investors.
3. Refresh Grant Planner: See which employees are completing vesting soon, and plan out refresh grants to tenured employees to help retain top performers
4. Equity Pool Forecast: Visualize your equity grants, hiring, and retention initiatives and their impact on your equity pool over time.

Who is this available for?

All Corporation founders and administrators who can view their company’s cap table.

How do I use it?

You can access these flows by going to your Carta account, and going to Manage Employees in the side navigation. From there, you can easily access all of the additional tools.

View a demo walkthrough of this feature.

Anything else I need to know? 

If there is anything you wish to see here, use the feedback form that will show up when you first visit the Manage employees page. If you have already responded and have additional feedback, or cannot find the form, you can reach out to your CSM or provide feedback via Carta Community.

What’s new?

We’ve improved our management fees to ensure you receive accurate offset calculations and experience a smooth approval process, every quarter.

What’s important about this change?

When approving management fees, you can now remain confident offsets are accurately accounted for with improvements to our offsets calculator. This means offsets will be properly allocated to partners in accordance with your LPA.

Plus, spend less time reviewing management fees and approve now, but transfer later with our new scheduling feature. 

How does it work?

You’ll receive an email and notification through your Activity tab that your fees are ready for review, this time 10 days prior to the new quarter.

You’ll then review your management fee calculations. Not only did we simplify the view of your total fees due, but we’ve made it easier for you to understand previously allocated fees, fee savings, and reductions due to offsets or waivers.

After you approve your fees, you now have the ability to customize the transfer amount, in this case I selected the full amount, and date the fees are transferred with our new scheduling feature. Because we’re sending you your fees  for review 10 days prior to the new quarter, you can review and approve then, but select to transfer on July 1.
 

Next, select the pay from and pay to accounts, and approve the transfer. If taking advantage of automated money movement to transfer your fee, check the box to authorize the money movement.

How do I learn more or get help?

To learn more about Carta’s management fees feature, reach out to your Account Director or if you’re new to Carta, schedule a demo today.

What’s new?

We’ve redesigned our capital call experience to introduce self-serve capabilities, like direct edits and self-release, allowing you to get your time sensitive capital calls out even faster.

But we didn’t just build for speed, we know the importance of an error-free capital call for both you and your investors, so we’ve introduced automatic health checks and pulled in critical details from your LPA to ensure accuracy in every detail.

What’s important about this change?

Gone are the days of waiting on your fund admin to review an urgent capital call, and the chance of human error. Now, you can remain confident you’re sending out an accurate capital call to investors, no matter the timeline.

How does it work?

Navigate to your Activity tab, select Call Capital, then select the type of capital call. We’ve introduced two additional options, “bring investors in line”, which means you want all of your investors to be at an equal percent of their commitments, and a “custom” option, if none of the options listed work for you.

If calling capital Pro rata, select the investors to call, enter your amount, and the purpose of the capital call. Your called capital calculations will be updated in real-time in the summary module as you modify the page.

As a last update to ensure your time sensitive capital calls get out as quickly as possible, we now give you the ability to send this capital call without waiting for your fund admin to review.

If everything looks correct, you can send to investors now, schedule for later, or still send to our team for a custom request or second review. If any of our automatic health checks are failing, we’ll require a fund admin review before you’re able to release.

How do I learn more or get help?

To learn more about Carta’s capital calls, reach out to your Account Director or if you’re new to Carta, schedule a demo today.

What’s new?

We’ve enhanced our fund formations so fund managers can now access a self-serve, guided experience, all in the same platform they manage their funds. 

What’s important about this change?

Whether you’re an emerging manager forming a fund for the first time, or an established GP looking to scale your firm, Carta makes the fund formation process quick and easy with an in-app, step-by-step experience. 

You’ll be able to understand exactly what step in the formation process you’re on, what information you need to provide, and how many steps to go. 

How does it work?

You’ll be guided through the formation process step-by-step, starting with the basics like adding members to your fund and providing details like the name of your entities. 

After you enter your fund details, we’ll form your entities with Delaware and obtain your EIN, removing days of manual work by automating this process.

Next, you’ll move on to more complex items like fund financials and ownership stakes. You’ll get to define fund terms for legal agreements like closings and waterfalls, and set your management fees. If you’re new to venture, we’ll provide you guidance and best practices along the way.

The last step in structuring your fund is signing final documents like your LPA and Operating Agreement. All of the information you entered in the steps prior to this is what populates these documents here.

You can easily track who’s been invited to sign these documents and their progress.

Once all steps are complete and documents are signed, you can then get ready to invite investors to close into your fund. Carta’s data room and closings tool makes the closings experience smoother for both you and your investors.

How do I learn more or get help?

To learn more about Carta’s Fund Formation, reach out to your Account Director or if you’re new to Carta, schedule a demo today.