US-based firm Carta led undisclosed funding secured by Kenyan fundraising startup Raise
Carta, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in capitalisation table management and valuation software, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from the Kenyan company Raise, an end-to-end fundraising platform.
Marvin Coleby and Eugene Mutai founded Raise in 2018, and it debuted its alpha in 2019 before going public in June 2020.
With a comprehensive solution for managing shareholding structure before and after fundraising, its platform is made to make cap table management for startups and businesses operating within the African ecosystem simpler. This frees up businesses to concentrate on expansion and constructing a successful future.
The largest ownership platform in the world, Carta, which aims to create a global stock exchange for private companies, has now agreed to provide funding to Raise. With US $1.2 billion in funding, 2 million shareholders, US $2.5 trillion in assets, and 35,000 companies on board, Carta is regularly acquiring and investing in similar ownership products in key international markets.
“Since the Carta strategy team joined our cap table, we’ve been working really closely with them to understand how to bring the best customer experiences to African tech. We’ve been learning everything we can, from podcasts and mentorship from growth, content, sales, finance, and engineering teams all the way from C-Suite to management-level teams at Carta. Carta is the best at what we do, and we figured we could learn how to apply those learnings to build Africa’s largest ownership platform,” Coleby said.
“We’re still figuring out what product-market fit will look like in African tech. With the Carta team, we’ve explored a bunch of different angles, and we’ll probably share some polls on Twitter so that you can tell us what we should build.”
Customers of Raise can expect a relaunch of its electronic shares product as well as experiments with African currency settlements, syncing with syndicate platforms throughout the ecosystem to allow direct investment into equity structures and cap tables, and integrated market data from the tech ecosystem.
In order to give customers the best ownership, equity, and security experiences possible, Raise also intends to make use of Carta’s API and the open cap table standard it is developing. Customers and shareholders who already use Carta can sync their holdings with Raise and perform health checks against macroeconomic and legal developments in Africa.
