Carta builds standalone compensation platform

Carta is turning a back office system of record into a data product with its own wedge into HR. The important shift is that compensation benchmarking does not require Carta to own the cap table first. Carta can sell salary and equity bands directly to founders and people teams, use data from 40,000 startups and over one million employee records to help set pay, then pull some of those customers into the broader Carta stack later.

• This product is concrete, not just analytical. Companies use it to benchmark a role by level and geography, build salary and equity bands, and manage pay ranges. Cap table customers get extra features tied to employee equity holdings, but the core product is also sold standalone to companies off platform.
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• The strategic logic is familiar in this category. Pave sells benchmarking, pay bands, merit planning, and equity data as a dedicated compensation product, and Morgan Stanley chose to integrate Pave into Shareworks rather than build every layer itself. That shows compensation has become a distinct software budget, not just a feature inside equity admin.
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• Carta has already shown this pattern in private markets. It used the cap table as the base to add 409A valuations, fund admin, and other workflows. In the liquidity discussion around Carta, compensation was described as part of understanding the full flow from salary to shares. Total Compensation extends that same logic into a new buyer, HR and recruiting.
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The next step is a broader private market operating system where compensation becomes both a revenue line and a distribution channel. As pay transparency spreads and startups want tighter control over equity dilution, the winning product will be the one that helps set salary, size equity grants, and connect those decisions back to ownership records and finance workflows.