Building India's Carta with EquityList
Kashish Sharma, CEO of EquityList on building Carta of India
The key difference is that India is still building the plumbing for employee equity, while the US is already building markets on top of that plumbing. In India, many startups still need help creating a board approved ESOP plan, issuing grants correctly, filing documents, and explaining to employees what their options are worth. In the US, cap table software is already mature, so platforms can focus further downstream on liquidity, price discovery, and issuer run tender programs.
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EquityList is designed around Indian compliance work that founders often still do through lawyers, company secretaries, spreadsheets, and ROC filings. That makes templating schemes, generating documents, tracking grants, and helping employees understand exercise price and payout scenarios more urgent than building a broad secondary marketplace today.
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US platforms like Carta, Forge, EquityZen, and Nasdaq Private Market serve a market where employees and investors already expect periodic liquidity. Those tools are built for tender offers, brokered trades, recurring sale windows, and market based pricing, all of which matter most once a company already has a clean cap table and a large, informed shareholder base.
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India is moving in that direction, but liquidity has so far centered more on company buybacks at larger startups than on continuous secondary trading. That pushes EquityList toward being a system of record and workflow layer first, then a liquidity layer later, especially as AngelList India’s investor network gives it a path to connect cap table data with future buyback and secondary programs.
Over time, Indian equity software should follow the same arc the US did, from record keeping, to employee education, to structured liquidity. As more Indian startups reach late stage scale and employees treat stock as real compensation, the winners will be the platforms that already own the cap table, the approvals, and the shareholder workflow when buybacks and secondary windows become routine.