California-based
fintech startup
Carta is exiting the stock sale business. The announcement comes after a controversy over the weekend that apparently revealed the conflicting nature of its operations. Initially focused on cap table management for startups,
Carta
has been accused of entering into the secondary trading business using its clients’ data without their consent.
On January 5,
Karri Saarinen
, CEO of issue tracking software Linear, in a long post on
accused Carta of using its cap table data to approach one of its investors about selling shares without the company’s knowledge or consent.
Here's CEO Karri Saarinen's LinkedIn post
This might be the end of Carta as the trusted platform for startups. As a founder it feels kind shitty that Carta, who I trust to manage our cap table, is now doing cold outreach to our angel investors about selling Linear shares to their non disclosed buyers.
They never contacted us (their customer) about starting an order book for Linear shares. The investor they reached out to is a family member whose investment we never published anywhere. We and they never opted in to any kind of secondary sales.
Yet Carta Liquidity found their email and knew that they owned Linear shares.
What Carta CEO said on the accusations
Responding to the accusations, Carta CEO Henry Ward wrote on Medium, “Because we have the data, if we are trading secondaries, people will always worry that we are using the data, even if we are not. So we have decided to prioritise trust, and exit the secondary trading business.”
Karri Saarinen responds on X
Saarinen wrote a long post on X, formerly Twitter, about the call he received from Carta CEO Henry Ward explaining the issue. "Henry starts explaining Carta Marketplace is a separate business from Carta. They have investors that come to them with their portfolios in order to offload shares, mostly with growth companies. He mentions several companies who they transact with “all the time”, he wrote.
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