The service makes managing your cap table pretty easy. They do not have a great support system, but their platform is easy enough where you can figure out how to manage your documents.
Carta raised pricing on us by almost 10x without warning or explanation. When asking them about this, they basically dismissed my frustration with the way they went about charging us by essentially saying they dont want me to be frustrated but there's nothing they can do about it. Let me note that with this new price increase I was never sent a letter or email letting us know that our price would increase. Additionally, they did not send any receipts to our account and the only way I found out about the charges was that I happened to be doing our books. Unfortunately, this is not a company you can trust. We are, essentially, stuck at this point because we simply do not know what to do to manage the documents that we had entrusted to them when we first started our company.
We are trying to solve the problem of issuing vesting stock options to new employees on a small scale, and managing our cap table and document storage.
The ability to manage all my ESOP's & RSU's from multiple years and vesting schedules into a single place is highly convenient. The application shows you both the Net & Total Holding value based on today's share prices. In case of ESOP's it also gives you a clear idea about the amount one needs to pay to exercise the options.
For non-US bank accounts you need to set up wire transfer which involves an extra fee and an intermediary back, which is not very user friendly way of doing things.
Employee benefits management like ESOP's & RSU's.
The easy-to-use and intuitive interface as well as the wide variety of reporting functionality. Also, it seems like Carta really listens to customer feedback and continues to implement new features that really add value.
I really can't think of anything I don't like.
We do our whole equity management in Carta, i.e. stakeholder management, cap table management, 409a valuations, stock option expense accounting, etc.
Free 409a for portfolio companies, simplifies equity tracking when many stakeholders
Massive pricing increasing, pricing mistakes versus agreed pricing, major technical issues (unable to support EUR denominated share prices), lack of clarity on roadmap (operational metric reporting), complete lack of accountability by customer success and support team, poor onboarding.
Equity cap table management. It has helped our portfolio companies save money on 409a, it has also simplified administrative tracking for us (post implementation).
Carta is a cap table management platform. It's something that can be relatively well done using even a simple excel spreadsheet and dropbox folder. However, Carta does candidly make it easier to manage (and importantly for employees) to view your equity within the business. It's a safe go-to for Cap Table, but now there are dozens of others, including Pulley that offer a near identical service.
After a "teaser" price for 1 year, Carta representative reached out saying they're tripling (3x) the cost of our license for the subsequent year. It's not impossible, but definitely inconvenient to transition. We will be offboarding, but it's been a headache. My recommendation: start with someone else. Carta ethics and price gouging are far from acceptable.
Cap table management.
Anything a startup needs to do for equity management, Carta is built for it. Reporting is easy. Issuing options is easy. Board approvals are easy. 409As are easy.
It does get pricey as you scale, and switching costs are high. Once you're in the system, the costs go up each year and it isn't all that transparent until you get the invoice.
We've had Carta ever since we started bringing on external investors to our company. Today, we've raised Seed, Series A, and Series B rounds and brought on over 100 employees and investors with equity. I can't imagine living without it.
Carta makes it easy to track all your investors/equity, option exercises & new option issues, along with various additional tools such as expense accounting and scenario modeling. Some of the additional tools are extra cost but they are worth it. Customer service is also very good.
Nothing that I really dislike. Overall a great tool. I've used many of Carta's features and the only one I would say still needs a bit of improvement is the Data Rooms.
Simple cap table management, options exercise, expense accounting, scenario modeling for new funding rounds, 409A valuation. It's been very easy to track everything related to equity. The only mistakes we've noticed are input mistakes which were internal.
Straightforward UI in front of a complex process
pricing is not as competitive as others, but the value is still there.
Managing multiple investments in a single environment and experience