Starting today, we are launching a new feature that will reduce the ACH transaction processing time for money movements on Carta by 33%. Previously, most ACH transfers took 6-7 business days to complete. We have made a few infrastructure changes to reduce transfer times by up to 2 business days. 

Who is this for? 

This change will impact all private and public corporations who move money directly on Carta, as well as holders of securities from these firms. LLCs will not be impacted by this change. 

How long will my transfers take? 

There is a slight variation in how long ACH transfers will take depending on what type of transaction the company or holder is making. The estimated processing times for the following transactions are below:

• SAFE Financings transactions: 4-5 business days (previously 6-7 business days)
• Private company exercises: 4-5 business days (previously 6-7 business days)
• Private company ACH repurchases: 3-4 business days (previously 5-6 business days)
• Public market trade settlements: 1 business day (previously 2 business days)
• Public markets options exercise: 4-5 business days (previously 6-7 business days)
• CINC tender offers: 1 business day (previously 2 business days)

I am a company administrator. How do I approve exercise requests in Carta?

Company administrators with the Option exercise approver role are able to individually review the submitted online option exercise requests and historical option exercises from the Transactions > Exercises page on Carta. For detailed instructions, you can check out this support article. 

I am a company administrator. How do I track early exercise requests and 83(b) elections?

Use the Filter function to select Yes for Early exercise to track 83(b) elections from the option holders. The ledger will display a filing status that depends on when the option holder originally submitted the early exercise request and whether or not the option holder explicitly chose to file an 83(b) election. Learn more about the 83(b) election. 

I hold options in a company that uses Carta to manage its equity. How do I exercise options on Carta via ACH? 

Exercising options into shares on Carta via ACH is available to US-based option holders of US private companies exercising ISOs, NSOs, or ISO/NSO split option grants. You can review detailed instructions in this support article. 

We are making it easier for companies to keep employees, investors, and other stakeholders informed about their holdings and company changes. 

Companies have historically been able to grant viewing permissions to their stakeholders via our Cap Table Sharing page and features. This experience, however, was burdensome for many company administrators who found themselves having to change sharing settings as new stakeholders were added to their cap table or existing stakeholders changed their relationship to the company, such as an employee leaving the company or an investor exiting their position.

With our new Cap Table Access page, company administrators can designate what type of information they want to share with their different stakeholders and set rules based on these preferences. By setting permissions by rules instead of a stakeholder-by-stakeholder process, we make it easier for company administrators to get the right stakeholders the appropriate information and reflect their information sharing philosophy.

Companies can choose to enable a group of stakeholders with a specific level of access based on their relationship to the company. For example, companies can choose what information founders, investors, employees, and former employees, and other stakeholders access on Carta. We’ve renamed, updated, and simplified our access levels to Restricted, Basic, Advanced, and Full Details. We include a “Recommended” level for different relationships (e.g. Investors = Advanced) to help guide founders and other company administrators on setting up their Cap Table Access settings based on user feedback. 

We’ve also added a new rule where former stakeholders--those who no longer have an active investment or holding in the company--will be downgraded to Restricted automatically. This means that as stakeholders enter and exit the cap table, their respective level of cap table access will update automatically.

New Cap Table Access page: Group levels

We know that sometimes it’s important for company administrators to create experiences specific to a single stakeholder or user. The new Cap Table Access feature allows companies to set overrides for specific stakeholders in the “Individual levels” tab. We also provide information on that stakeholder’s relationship and holdings information.

New Cap Table Access page: Individual levels

To help ensure company administrators set access levels that best fit the needs of their stakeholders, our access level guide is clickable from either the Group Level or Individual Level views of the new Cap Table Access page.

Access level guide

We appreciate our users’ feedback on how to make this page clearer and easier to use. We hope these improvements save company administrators valuable time and help them mirror their company information sharing philosophy in our software.

Who is this available for?

The cap table sharing page is available via a limited release to select Carta companies. In the coming weeks, we will begin to migrate additional companies to the new Cap Table Access feature set. This new product is not limited by subscription tier.

Companies with the new Cap Table Access features enabled can visit Stakeholders > Cap Table Access. 

If you’d like to enable the new Cap Table Access settings for your company, you can also contact us.

Carta Total Comp 

Carta cap table customers can now access our benchmarking and planning platform to streamline their compensation processes and compensate with confidence.

What’s new?

Workflow tools built on top of the world’s largest equity data set and powerful HR integrations to help you make better compensation decisions faster. Carta Total Comp customers are now able to access the following compensation benchmarking and planning features:

• Automated Leveling - Map each of your employees into an area, track and level using Carta’s universal leveling framework.
• Scorecard - Summarizes employee salary and equity information from your HRIS and cap table to give a holistic overview of your organization’s total compensation.
• Bands - Automatically generate equity and salary bands for any role by filtering for job area, track and location.  
• HRIS Integration -  Integrate instantly with any of the most common HRIS systems.
• Coming Soon - Plan -  Easily build, manage and apply your compensation strategy across your employee base.

Get a pulse on your org through your company Scorecard tab

Benchmark any role in the Bands tab

Availability

• If you are interested in learning more about Carta Total Comp, please reach out to your Carta Customer Success Manager or sign up here.
• You must be a Carta cap table customer to sign up for Carta Total Comp.

Additional Resources 

• Carta Total Comp announcement from our Chief Product Officer, Heidi Johnson. Link to Blog Post.

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. 

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.

What’s coming: We've made a few changes to our login screen to help users get access to their Carta account. We want to make sure your first interaction with Carta is clear, simple, and secure.

Who this affects: 

• All Users accessing the login screen.

What’s new:

• Added a new link to help troubleshoot log in issues and contact support.
• Updated the show password toggle to an icon to simplify the page layout. This is consistent with our designs also on our registration page.

  
  
  
  

New log in page

Previous log in page

Over the last few months, we’ve been listening to your feedback on our changelog and identified usability and customization as two areas for improvement. Today, we are announcing our new and improved Release Notes in order to provide you with up-to-date information and news on Carta product changes. 

Key features of our Release Notes include:

Filter by label

You can now filter out notes to only include the ones you care about most. You will be able to filter by Carta product area (Corporations, Investor Services, Platform, and CartaX), customer type (Employee, Equity Administrator, Board Member, etc. ), or release stage (General Audience, Preview, etc.)

You can filter by label on the right hand side of the screen by selecting the label you’d like to see notes on.

Subscribe for recurring product updates

Curious to know about all the great things we’re releasing on a regular basis? Subscribe to our Release Notes. You will get an email to your inbox whenever we post a new update. You can find the subscribe button at the top of the Release Notes page.

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 😊🎉

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.

If you have stock options or common stock from a public company, you can now place limit orders that will remain outstanding for up to 30 calendar days. If you are attempting to sell at a particular limit price, selecting Good Till Cancel will allow the order to trade for multiple days without re-entering each day.

Upon entering a cashless exercise and sell, cashless exercise and hold, or stock sale, selecting Limit order now enables the choice of Day or Good until cancelled.

Selecting Good until cancelled enables you to place an order that remains outstanding until the earlier of 30 calendar days, or your entry into a trading blackout.

Following placement, you can view your order in the Orders screen. This view now shows order duration, where you can track both Day and Good Till Cancel orders, in addition to the date that the orders will be cancelled if they are not executed: