Carta

What an incredible evening! Earlier this week, more than 120 LPs, GPs, and private capital leaders from across Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa gathered at The Glasshouse, Andaz Singapore for the third Carta LP/GP Summit, and the conversations did not disappoint. The evening opened with a data presentation from our Q2 2026 Fund Performance report, highlighting the latest trends on how private markets are faring today and setting the stage for a panel that dug right into what those trends mean in practice. Our panel, "How LPs Evaluate Continuation Vehicles & GP-Led Exits," explored a topic front of mind for many in the room: with valuations compressed and exit timelines stretched, how are GPs rethinking their approach, and what does it take for an LP to say yes? A big thank you to our panelists for sharing their sharp perspectives and valuable insights: - Dominic Goh, Managing Director, HarbourVest Partners - Edoardo Collevecchio, Managing Director Asia, Oppenheimer Generations - Nader Albastaki, Managing Director, Dubai Future District Fund The evening wrapped up with great conversations over networking and a bespoke whisky blending experience, giving everyone a few more reasons to linger. 🥃 To everyone who joined us, thank you for making it such a memorable evening of meaningful conversations and connections! #LPGPSummit #PrivateEquity #VentureCapital #PrivateCapital #LPs #FundPerformance

For emerging fund managers, raising a second fund is quite a different game now than it was a few years ago. Carta data shows that the median time from Fund I to Fund II for US-based VC firms has gone up some 50% from 2018 till the first half of 2026. What used to be about a 2.5 year gap is now a 4 year gap. A few factors are at play here. First of all, many LPs are still waiting on liquidity from earlier investments in order to make new commitments. As long as exit markets are frozen, there are fewer LPs available across the VC ecosystem. Funds are closing with fewer LPs per fund than they used to. LPs have also raised the bar in terms of the type of fund they want to invest in. Sophisticated institutional investors want to see fund managers with a proven track record of prior performance, AI-enabled fund operations, and transparency around data. Pacing your Fund I deployment, continuously nurturing relationships with LPs, and planning for secondary pathways to get liquidity from your earlier fund are strategies that could help in closing that next fund. If you're raising your Fund II right now or did so recently, share your experience in the comments!

Anthropic launched a plugins marketplace for Claude last week. We built our own plugin suite in April. Our CPO Vrushali Paunikar wrote about the difference between MCP and plugins, and why we bet on plugins early. MCP is the outlet: an open standard that lets any app connect. A plugin is the appliance, built with the actual expertise so people don't have to wire it up themselves. Our customers are CFOs, founders, GPs, and LPs. They needed accuracy, not a blank prompt box. Carta Home gives them a live dashboard inside Claude. Our valuation and waterfall modeling runs the real math and lands the output directly in Excel. Read Vrushali's full post: https://lnkd.in/gWeQQ26d

Your fund can talk now. Ask it anything → https://lnkd.in/gU_FRdUB

How much ownership does the lead founder (typically the CEO) in a startup retain as the company grows? As Carta data shows, it depends on the initial equity split with any other cofounders. Of course, the larger the initial founding team, the less equity the lead founder starts with. In a two-person team the lead founder typically starts with 56%, while in a five-person team, they start with 36%. Over time, as a company grows and fundraises, the founders get diluted by investors and the employee pool. By Series D+, the lead founder's ownership is in the single digits, regardless of how large the founding team size initially was. In the ideal scenario, that single-digit late-stage ownership still represents more value than the initial starting point; that's the whole game of venture growth.

🌉 Fog's rolling in, and so are six San Francisco Tech Week events you don't want to miss. If you're in our city October 5-9, come find us: Law in the Age of AI Monday, October 5 | 9–11 AM Breakfast panel on how AI is reshaping legal work for startups, with perspectives from founders, ECVC lawyers, and operators tracking where legal is headed. Co-hosted with SimpleClosure. RSVP: https://lnkd.in/gYZAeu32 Founders Flow: Yoga with a View Tuesday, October 6 | 8:30 AM Start the week grounded. Morning yoga and networking at the WilmerHale SF office. No panels, no pitch decks, just community. Co-hosted with WilmerHale. RSVP: https://lnkd.in/gyA--jey Tech Week Basketball Tournament Wednesday, October 7 | 6 PM 3v3 tournament for founders, operators, and investors. One winning team, all the energy. Co-hosted with The Collective and TECH WEEK by a16z. RSVP: https://lnkd.in/gxdwwqA4 The Raise Ready Breakfast Thursday, October 8 | 8:30–10 AM A strong idea isn't enough anymore. A panel on what investors actually want to see — cap table, financials, and fundraising strategy. Co-hosted with Crunchbase and Morrison Foerster. RSVP: https://lnkd.in/grjJzFw7 Paul Hastings & Escalon Lunch Thursday, October 8 | 10 AM–1:30 PM An investor-focused lunch bringing together founders, lawyers, and operators for great conversation and even better company. Co-hosted Paul Hastings and Escalon Services. RSVP: https://lnkd.in/dw3vcnks Founders & Funders Rooftop Party Thursday, October 8 | 6–8:30 PM The signature close to SF Tech Week. 250+ founders and investors at Sens SF. Co-hosted with Morrison Foerster. RSVP: https://lnkd.in/gaKXnq7J San Francisco's tech ecosystem is showing up in a big way this week. Hope to see you at one (or all) of these. #SFTechWeek #Carta #Networking #Startups #SanFrancisco #Tech

Running a tender offer means knowing who qualifies to sell, and how much, based on hold periods, tenure, and per-stakeholder participation limits. Our CFO Charly Kevers used to piece that together from several reports and build the qualification math by hand. Now he builds the whole eligibility artifact with one prompt to the Carta Cap Table Plugin for Claude. The plugin pulls the data straight from the live cap table: it applies the holding period, checks exercise and settlement status for options and RSUs, confirms tenure against hire date, and caps participation by stakeholder relationship type. Every input is adjustable, and the model recalculates instantly, down to what each individual stakeholder can sell. It even labels itself as a live calculation rather than a saved Carta model, with a note to verify with counsel before it goes into the actual offer. "I can do it all with a single prompt," Charly says. "I get an interactive model. I can adjust the hold period, the tenure cutoff, the max participation percentage, and it recalculates in real time. That's the analysis I can bring to the board." See how it works: https://lnkd.in/gp9-3pfJ #CapTableManagement #TenderOffer #PrivateCapital #FinTech #AI

The 2017 VC vintage just posted its highest TVPI on record. Its IRR is at a two-year low. That split runs across the best-performing 2017-2019 vintages: top-decile IRR has been sliding for two years while top-decile TVPI keeps climbing. The 2017 vintage's 90th percentile IRR sits at 25.7%, down from 28.7% two years ago. Its 90th percentile TVPI is now 4.14x, up from 3.31x. The takeaway: paper value is real and growing, boosted in part by AI-driven markups. But it's taking longer to convert into distributions. Median DPI for the 2017 vintage is still just 0.37x; for the 2019 vintage, it's 0.04x. We're also seeing a flight to megafunds: 64% of 2025 VC capital went to funds over $100M, up from 38% in 2017. Those larger funds now rely on far fewer LPs to get there. Our full Q2 2026 report has the data on IRR, TVPI, and DPI across every recent vintage: https://lnkd.in/g-twFtkk #VentureCapital #PrivateCapital #FundPerformance #LPs #VC

Fund managers email their portfolio companies asking for updated numbers every quarter. Some don't respond. The ones who do usually send back a PDF or a deck, and someone has to pull the numbers out by hand before the portfolio picture comes together. We're showing a faster way in a live 30-minute demo of Carta's Plugins for Claude: send data requests in bulk, pull KPIs straight from board decks and financial docs, and see it all in one dashboard next to cap table and valuation history. Henry Ward (CEO), Jordan Agnew (Director of Product), and Meghan Byrd (Principal Product Manager) are hosting. Thursday, September 24 at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST. Register here: https://lnkd.in/g4Qu3w4z

Raising a venture fund today looks very different than it did even two years ago. Having recently gone through this journey building Blue Tulip Ventures, I’ve experienced firsthand just how much relationship-building, persistence and operational discipline it takes to raise a fund.  I’m excited to join Hamza Shad of Carta and Vienna Poiesz of Strut Consulting for a conversation about what fundraising actually looks like in today’s market.  I’ve learned A LOT raising our first fund at Blue Tulip Ventures, and I look forward to sharing some of the lessons learned, including a few things I wish I had known when we started. We’ll also dig into Carta’s latest data on how the fundraising market is evolving. If you’re raising a fund, thinking about raising one, or simply curious about what the market looks like right now, I hope you’ll join us. 📅 September 22 at 1 PM ET 🔗https://lnkd.in/gfVmsah3