Carta Poaches Solium and Certent

This win rate shows that Carta was not just selling simpler cap table software to new startups, it was prying away larger, more operationally messy customers from legacy incumbents. Later stage companies have more shareholders, more option grants, more board approvals, and more tax and transfer work. That made Solium and Certent vulnerable if their products still depended on manual updates, while Carta could use the cap table as a live system of record and then layer tender offers, tax calculations, and share transfers on top.

• The key wedge was workflow, not just price. Legacy providers were associated with manual upkeep, while Carta automated changes directly from the cap table, which mattered much more once a company had hundreds of stakeholders and constant equity activity.
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• Winning a few later stage accounts each month mattered disproportionately because these customers were the bridge to higher value products. Once the cap table lived on Carta, the same data could power 409A valuations, board workflows, tender offers, secondary transfers, and eventually fund admin relationships with investors.
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• This also explains why the competition split by company size. Smaller companies often came from spreadsheets because they had not outgrown manual processes yet. Larger companies were true replacement deals, where Carta had to beat an incumbent by proving it could run the equity back office with less friction and better liquidity tooling.
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The long arc points toward cap table software becoming private market infrastructure. The vendor that becomes the trusted system of record for later stage companies gets the best shot at owning adjacent workflows around liquidity, compensation, investor reporting, and share transfer. That is why these replacement wins mattered far beyond the seat count of each individual deal.