Carta strongest for company tenders
Q&A with Balthazar de Lavergne and Mathias Pastor at Semper
Carta is hardest for Semper where private liquidity behaves like workflow software, not capital markets. In a U.S. only tender, the company already has its cap table on Carta, can invite eligible sellers in one system, reconcile ownership after closing, and complete the transfer with less legal and ops work. Semper is differentiated where deals get messier, with smaller companies, international employees, custom rules, and recurring auction style programs.
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The real fault line is tender offers versus auctions. Carta is strongest in fixed price, company run tenders, while Semper is built around collecting seller interest, gathering investor bids, and clearing at the price that maximizes traded volume, which is more useful when price discovery matters.
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Carta benefits from vertical integration. Its cap table software is already the system of record for many U.S. startups, and its tender product uses that data to invite sellers, update ownership records, and handle transfers. That makes domestic issuer led programs faster and simpler to launch.
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Semper is aiming at the part of the market Carta was serving less aggressively, younger companies, often around $250M valuation, and more international teams. That means more education, more cross border settlement work, and more need for tools around taxes, employee modeling, and investor aggregation.
The market is moving toward recurring liquidity, but it will likely split by use case. Large U.S. companies will keep gravitating to integrated tender workflows, while cross border and earlier stage issuers will push demand toward platforms that can handle more bespoke rules, more frequent events, and better price discovery before IPO.