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Henry Ward, CEO of Carta, discussed the current fundraising environment, noting that private companies are raising 50% more total funding this year than in 2023, but headcount is declining, with dollars raised per employee nearly 2x what it was in 2022-23. He attributed this to AI token costs making startups more capex-intensive. Ward argued that IPOs are not attractive because private valuations are almost 2x public ones, and companies can get capital privately. He highlighted tender offers as the dominant liquidity mechanism, often tied to financings. Ward dismissed regulation as a barrier to IPOs, citing the punitive nature of public markets. He advocated for allowing equity compensation to be contributed to 401ks, and discussed the accredited investor rule, saying democratizing access wouldn't help because private companies choose their shareholders. Carta is focusing on private equity and private credit, and Ward noted the company was unprofitable for 12 years before becoming profitable.
Key takeaways
Private companies are on track to raise 50% more total funding this year than in 2023, but headcount is declining.
Dollars raised per employee in private companies is almost 2x what it was in 2022-23.
Private valuations are almost 2x public valuations, making IPOs unattractive.
Carta is all in on private equity and private credit as its next chapter.
Carta was unprofitable for 12 years (172 consecutive months) before becoming profitable.
To begin with, so you at Carta, you have a great window into the cap tables of some of the biggest and most well-known and most rapidly growing private companies in the world. Give us a sense of as you look at those companies, how are they doing right now? What is the fundraising environment?
Companies are raising unbelievable amounts of money. I think we're at something like, last report Peter did, our data guy, something like 50% more total funding. We're on track for 50% more total funding this year than 2023. But the headcount is actually declining of these companies. Like we're just not, they're not hiring. And I think the dollars raised per employee now I think is almost 2x what it was in 22 and 23.
I think it's the extreme outliers of these startups that are just raising huge amounts of capital in part because they have to pay for tokens and all these things. So they're more capex intensive than they used to be. Where our biggest cost structure, you know, in the 2010s was like cloud compute which wasn't that much, it's all people was the problem and now we actually have people payroll competing with tokens. And so you have to raise a lot more money on a per headcount basis. I don't see any end to that insight like we're just spending more on tokens. I mean if you look at the Anthropic graphs that it's not even nonlinear it's like vertical on token spend.
Yeah. And so how are these private businesses now looking at the idea of going public and weighing up how long they stay private and at what point they go public because we're seeing IPO markets opening up now. Is that encouraging people to start going out?
I don't know if they're opening up yet. You know, I think everyone's waiting for SpaceX. You know, I don't know anything but I think you'll be waiting a long time. Like it just doesn't feel like, you know, why? What's the reason? I don't think there's any reason for companies to go public if you're doing well in the private markets right now. Private valuations are almost 2x what you see in public. Like you just, you're able to find, you know, there's no shortage of capital in the private markets today. And prices are much better in the private market. So I don't think it's, I think the traditional view was if a company had a good IPO, it just like opened the window for IPOs. I don't think that's been true since 2021. And I actually wonder if structurally that's actually going to change because the sort of currency, access to capital, all the things that you said were the reasons to go public, the best companies don't need that. They're getting it in the private markets.
Yeah. And what role do you think that Carta has in, and the other thing for going public of course is liquidity. What role do you have in giving liquidity to private companies?
Yeah. So, you know, the dominant form of liquidity in private companies is the tender offer and it's usually on the backs of a financing. So for example, company raises, you know, a $200 million, you know, series C, they have $300 million of demand. If they'll take the 200 because they don't want 300, that's too much dilution. And they'll let that 100 million of excess demand feed into the employees or early investors. And that's the dominant liquidity product. And it's dominant because it solves all the problems that exist in public markets that CEOs don't like, which is I know the price before I enter it. I can do many sellers to one or two buyers. I know who the buyers are and they're already shareholders by definition because they led the primary round. So we do a ton of that, that's been scaling a lot in the last year and a half. We'll continue to, I think that's going to continue to scale. I think the IPO sort of readiness, you know, the pitch for Carta has always been, you know, path to IPO. Two founders and a dog, you know, sign up on Carta and let's go and we'll help you get all the way to IPO and when you're ready to go public, you know, we'll send you to the New York Stock Exchange, we'll send you to Morgan Stanley for public comp administration and cap table management and we're everything in between. And that continues to be true. We now have a huge backlog of what I would describe as IPO ready companies that we're talking to every day about IPO prep and getting ready. But there's like a big, I think there's a big jump from we're ready or we could be ready to go. Do we actually want to go? I think everyone's looking at this as an option versus an eventuality.
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Ward, H. (2026, May 5). Carta CEO Henry Ward at Semafor World Economy [Interview transcript]. Semafor Events. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/886558/
MLA
Henry Ward. "Carta CEO Henry Ward at Semafor World Economy." Semafor Events, 5 May. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/886558/.
BibTeX
@misc{ward2026_886558,
author = {Henry Ward},
title = {Carta CEO Henry Ward at Semafor World Economy},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Semafor Events. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {may},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/886558/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
