Startups are staying private longer leaving employees, who typically take a portion of their compensation as stock they can’t sell, with little hope of early liquidity.
An increasing number of late-stage startups are recognizing this and offering tender offers to employees. These are transactions that allow employees (and, often, early investors) to sell a portion of their shares for a predetermined price to an approved investor.
To simplify the tender process, NewView recently partnered with Carta. The collaboration combines NewView’s secondary deal-structuring experience with Carta’s equity platform. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, pitches this as a way to help startups launch and manage liquidity programs more seamlessly.
“The hope is that this partnership will make it easier for CEOs and companies to think about tenders,” he said. He wants founders to think about giving employees early liquidity as a “win-win-win” for workers, companies, and investors alike.
A growing number of startups seem to agree. Over the past three years, tender offers are projected to increase threefold for Series C and later-stage startups, according to a recent study from NewView Capital and Carta. Plus, the startups that do choose tender offers are no longer just the most valuable private companies like OpenAI, Databricks, or Anduril, according to Viswanathan.
For instance, last year, his firm, which specializes in secondary deals along with typical venture investments, led a tender for a HighTouch at a $1.3 billion valuation, when the marketing customization startup was seven years old.
However, Carta and NewView also found that the overall share of startups launching these offerings remains relatively small, with just 44 executed in the first half of 2026. So Viswanathan wants to encourage other startups to consider tenders offers, calling them excellent retention tools and morale boosters.
A decade ago, being a unicorn was enough to attract talent, Viswanathan said, but with so many billion-dollar companies around today, that status may not be as much of a draw now. Offering a tender, he said, “is an opportunity to say you will also get liquidity in your journey with us.”
Some of the companies that recently held tender offers include AI customer support startup Decagon, self-driving tech developer Wayve, and AI voice generator ElevenLabs, which executed two such offerings in less than a year.
“The companies are staying private for 12 to 15 years. That’s not changing,” Viswanathan said. “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.”
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