Tender offers enabling employees at late-stage startups to sell shares early have increased threefold over the past three years among companies at Series C and beyond, according to a study released this week by NewView Capital and Carta. The partnership between the equity management platform and the secondary-focused investment firm aims to streamline the tender process, making it easier for founders to launch liquidity programs for workers whose stock compensation remains locked up as companies delay going public. The collaboration merges NewView's structuring expertise with Carta's existing equity infrastructure.
Despite the sharp uptick in tender activity, the overall portion of startups implementing these programs remains limited, with only 44 such transactions completed in the first six months of 2026. Tender offers are transactions allowing employees and early investors to offload a portion of their holdings at a set price to an approved buyer. The firms conducting these offerings are no longer exclusively the most highly valued private companies such as OpenAI, Databricks, or Anduril. Last year, NewView helped arrange a tender for Hightouch, a marketing customization startup valued at $1.3 billion when it was seven years old. Recent participants include Decagon, an AI customer support company, Wayve, which develops self-driving technology, and ElevenLabs, an AI voice generator that executed two tender offers in under 12 months.
Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, characterizes these liquidity events as a "win-win-win" for employees, companies, and investors. He wants founders to view tender offers as powerful retention mechanisms and morale enhancers. A decade ago, achieving unicorn status was sufficient to lure talent, Viswanathan noted, but with so many billion-dollar companies now in existence, that milestone may not carry the same weight. Offering a tender, he explained, "is an opportunity to say you will also get liquidity in your journey with us."
The extended timelines keeping startups private create an urgent need for alternative liquidity paths, according to the report. Companies are remaining private for 12 to 15 years, a duration that isn't expected to shrink. Without interim opportunities to convert equity into cash, high-quality venture-backed firms risk losing talent to public companies where stock can be sold immediately. Viswanathan frames the Carta-NewView partnership as a way to prevent this talent drain by normalizing early liquidity as standard practice rather than exception. The collaboration is designed to reduce the operational complexity that has historically discouraged CEOs from launching these programs, particularly at companies below the mega-valuation tier. By simplifying the mechanics, the partners hope more founders will adopt tender offers as a core component of their compensation strategy, ensuring employees who accept equity-heavy packages can actually realize value before an exit event that may be a decade or more away. The broader ambition is to make liquidity programs as routine as stock option grants themselves, reshaping expectations around when and how startup employees can access the wealth their shares represent. For startups navigating prolonged private status, the calculus has shifted from whether to offer liquidity to how quickly they can set it up.