Raise, a Kenyan fundraising platform, has raised an undisclosed sum of money from Carta, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in capitalisation table management and valuation software.
Raise was founded in 2018 by Marvin Coleby and Eugene Mutai, and it went public in June of 2020.
Its platform is intended to simplify cap table management for startups and companies operating in the African ecosystem by providing a comprehensive solution for managing shareholding structure before and after fundraising, allowing businesses to focus on growth and building a successful future.
Carta, the world’s largest ownership platform that is attempting to build a global stock exchange for private companies, has now funded Raise. Carta has raised $1.2 billion in funding and grown to two million shareholders, $2.5 trillion in assets, 35,000 companies onboarded, and is regularly acquiring and investing in similar ownership products in strategic markets around the world.
“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.”
Meanwhile, Raise customers can expect liquidity products and experiments with African currency settlements, as well as syncing with syndicate platforms across the ecosystem to invest directly into equity structures and cap tables, as well as integrated market data from the tech ecosystem and a relaunch of its electronic shares product.
Raise also intends to use Carta’s API and the open cap table standard it is developing to provide customers with world-class ownership, equity, and security experiences. Existing Carta customers and shareholders can directly sync their holdings to Raise, as well as run health checks against African law and macroeconomic trends.
