Startups Turn to Tender Offers as Private Markets Stretch Longer

Employee share sales are becoming a standard retention tool for venture-backed companies that remain private for extended periods.

NewView and Carta have formed a partnership to simplify the process of tender offers, which allow staff and early investors to sell a portion of their stock at a fixed price before a company goes public or is acquired. The collaboration combines NewView’s experience in structuring secondary deals with Carta’s equity management platform. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, stated that the goal is to make liquidity programs easier for CEOs to launch and manage.

Recent data from a joint study by NewView Capital and Carta indicates a rapid increase in this practice. Tender offers among Series C and later-stage startups have grown threefold over the past three years. Viswanathan noted that the companies utilizing these mechanisms are no longer restricted to the highest-valued private firms. He cited OpenAI, Databricks, and Anduril as examples of top-tier companies, but emphasized that the trend is now reaching a wider group of organizations.

Hightouch, a marketing customization startup, serves as a specific case study for the approach. Last year, NewView led a tender offer for the seven-year-old company at a valuation of $1.3 billion. Viswanathan described such transactions as a mutual benefit for employees, the company, and investors. He argued that the traditional recruiting pitch of offering equity with the promise of a future exit has lost some of its impact as the number of billion-dollar companies has increased.

Despite the growth, the practice is not yet universal. The same research found that only 44 tender offers were executed in the first half of 2026, which represents a small fraction of eligible startups. Viswanathan aims to widen this group, describing tenders as strong tools for retention and morale. He stated that a tender is an opportunity to tell employees they will receive liquidity during their tenure, rather than waiting for an exit.

Recent companies that have conducted tender offers include Decagon, an AI customer support firm; Wayve, a self-driving technology developer; and ElevenLabs, an AI voice generator that completed two offerings in less than a year. Viswanathan said he does not expect the long timelines for going public to change soon, noting that companies are staying private for 12 to 15 years. He added that liquidity must be provided to prevent a talent drain from high-quality venture-backed firms to their public counterparts.

The partnership seeks to lower the administrative burden on founders who wish to provide their teams with a cash-out option. By integrating the deal structuring with existing equity platforms, the firms aim to make the process more routine for late-stage startups. The focus is on making early liquidity a standard feature of corporate governance rather than a rare event reserved for the most prominent private companies.