<aside> 🎉 We’re excited to share our partnership with Carta, and officially welcome their team as an investor in Raise! Raise is Carta’s first investment in Africa.

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Carta + Raise 🎉

Since the Carta strategy team joined our cap table, we’ve been working really closely with them to understand how to bring the best customer experiences to African tech. We’ve been learning everything we can, from podcasts and mentorship from growth, content, sales, finance and engineering teams all the way from C-Suite to management-level teams at Carta. Carta is the best at what we do, and we figured we could learn how to apply those learnings to build Africa’s largest ownership platform.

Carta (Series G) is the world’s largest ownership platform with the goal of building a global stock exchange for private companies. Carta has raised $1.2 billion dollars and scaled to 2 million shareholders, $2.5 trillion dollars in assets, 35,000 companies onboarded and regularly making acquisitions and investments into similar ownership products in strategic markets across the world: Europe, Asia, India and Latin America. Recent acquisitions include Capdesk and Vauban.

<aside> ⚡ Raise is Carta’s first investment in Africa. It’s proof that Africa’s venture ecosystem is maturing. We’re excited to build the future of private markets in Africa with Carta’s help.

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Carta’s partnership and investment in Raise is an important signal of their dedication to building a global private stock exchange with integrations into Africa’s economy. Private markets are fundamental to financial independence. Economic independence is critical for countries and societies across the continent. Private markets are fundamental to Africa’s growth.

Carta figured out this business model, and their growth defined a generation of equity owners, founders and lawyers to build the private capital markets infrastructure in America. Throughout their journey, the team recognized that cap table products depend a lot on local regulations and market dynamics. As such, they’ve been working closely with our team to help us define what product market fit looks like for ownership products in Africa, and have been sure to provide us with the freedom to experiment, explore and build both off and on-chain products for the African technology market.

<aside> 🎉 Everything we’ve learned from Carta, we’ve built into our core product offerings that are shipping now and (accelerating) over the next few months. All of these upgrades to product and customer journeys are designed to take African startups from launch to liquidity, faster, and with clean cap tables.

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Here is what’s next for our customers and ecosystem 🔥

We’re still figuring out what product-market fit will look like in African tech. With the Carta team, we’ve explored a bunch of different angles, and we’ll probably share some polls on Twitter so that you can tell us what we should build. In the meantime, here’s what customers of Raise could expect soon:

• Liquidity products and experiments with African currency settlements (secondaries, stock option financing)
• Syncing with syndicate platforms across the ecosystem to invest directly into equity structures and cap tables
• Integrated market data from the tech ecosystem (like Pariti’s salary benchmark, Big Deal and Briter data) for better benchmarks for equity valuations across the world, like compensation, preferred share ownership and valuations across multiple markets
• Relaunching electronic shares product so that we can all hold equity in African tech companies in the palms of our hands (and on-chain 😉)
• Leveraging Carta’s API and the open cap table standard we’re all building to provide world-class ownership, equity and security experiences for your teams and shareholders
• Existing Carta customers and shareholders are able to sync their holdings directly to Raise, and run health checks against African law and macroeconomic trends

A lot of the African tech ecosystem is built on American securities law and capital markets. In our previous article, we already shared why that could be a problem. We also shared that it is an opportunity to leverage America’s experience to strengthen the foundations of African tech. We’ll be leveraging this relationship to advocate for:

• Building on stronger technical fundamentals for equity ownership standards, built with platforms like Carta in America, and others across Asia, India and Latin America