Startups are staying private longer, leaving employees, who often receive part of their pay as unsellable stock, with little chance of early cash. Over the past three years, tender offers for Series C and later startups are projected to triple, according to a study by NewView Capital and Carta.
To make the tender process easier, NewView has partnered with Carta, merging NewView's secondary-deal expertise with Carta's equity platform. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, says the alliance should help CEOs and companies consider tenders more readily.
Viswanathan describes early liquidity as a "win-win-win" for workers, companies and investors, and hopes the partnership will simplify the launch and management of such programs.
He notes that tender offers are no longer limited to the most valuable private firms like OpenAI, Databricks or Anduril. For example, last year his firm led a tender for HighTouch, a seven-year-old marketing-customization startup valued at $1.3 billion.
Despite growth, the share of startups using tenders remains low, with just 44 deals executed in the first half of 2026. Viswanathan wants more startups to view tenders as retention tools and morale boosters.
A decade ago, being a unicorn was enough to attract talent, but today many billion-dollar companies compete for workers. He says offering a tender "is an opportunity to say you will also get liquidity in your journey with us."
Recent companies that have run tenders include AI customer-support startup Decagon, self-driving tech firm Wayve, and AI voice generator ElevenLabs, which completed two offers within a year.
Viswanathan adds, "The companies are staying private for 12 to 15 years. That's not changing. In that interim, so that we don't have this talent drain from high-quality venture-backed companies into their public counterparts, we need to make sure that there is liquidity for the employees."
