Carta

Sources#

Summary#

eShares, Inc. dba Carta — the cap-table, valuation and equity-management platform most U.S. venture-backed startups run their ownership records on. It matters to this wiki not as a product but as an instrument: its Insights team / Data Desk, led by Peter Walker, publishes periodic reports derived from the platform's own cap tables, and those reports are the empirical floor under most of the vault's startup-domain claims about ownership, dilution, round medians, founding-team composition and headcount-at-round.

Carta data reaches the wiki by two routes, and the distinction is load-bearing when weighing a figure:

First-party publications — Carta's Data Desk writing about its own dataset (Founder Ownership Report 2026), or co-publishing with a third party who supplies the framing (The State of Solo Founding, where Solo Founders wrote the advocacy and Carta Insights supplied the numbers).
As a data partner — Emergence Capital's Beyond Benchmarks 2026 lists Carta as one of five partner datasets across 50K+ operating companies, which is where the vault's round-median headcount series (Seed 10.3 → 6.2, Series A 25.9 → 16.8, Series B 72.3 → 48.2) comes from. AWS's Engines of Growth cites "PitchBook/Carta, 2025" for its ~37.5× revenue-multiple assumption.

Named people on the bylines: Peter Walker (runs Insights; previously a marketing executive at a media-analytics startup and led the data-visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project), Kevin Dowd (senior writer; previously Forbes' Deal Flow newsletter and PitchBook's The Weekend Pitch), Hamza Shad.

What the instrument can and cannot see#

This is the section worth reusing, because the same three limits attach to every Carta figure in the wiki and they are not restated at each site.

Can see — everything that is a legal fact about ownership: formation dates, founding-team size, per-founder equity splits, round terms and dilution by stage, option-pool size, employee grant sizes, headcount at the moment of a round (via the grant table), and ownership at exit.

Cannot see — anything about the operating business. Carta holds cap tables, not revenue. No Carta publication can answer a revenue-per-employee question, which is why the open questions on AI Investment Story, Not Efficiency Story and The Solo-Founder Shift about the lean tail's RPE are marked structurally unanswerable by this instrument rather than merely unanswered.

The denominator is "on Carta." Every share-of-startups series is a share of companies on the platform, so it moves with Carta's own customer mix as well as with founder behavior. No Carta publication to date addresses platform-composition drift. The concrete worry, spelled out on The Solo-Founder Shift: solo founders are cheap to serve and likeliest to adopt a free cap-table tier, which would inflate a solo-founding trend with no change in the underlying population. This is the standing discount on every Carta trend in the vault, and — unlike a half-year sampling artifact — it is not fixable by waiting for more data.

A fourth, practical limit: the detail is gated. Both first-party reports publish a summary page and put the per-stage and per-sector breakdowns behind a lead-capture form — an email gate on a 100-page PDF in 2025, a first-name/last-name/company-email form in 2026. What the vault holds from the 2026 report is the ~1,150-word landing page. So Carta figures in this wiki are typically prose figures without the table behind them, which bounds how far any of them can be cross-checked.

The series drifts between publications#

Carta restates. Between the 2025 and 2026 reports the 2024 solo-founded share moved from 30.5% to 31% — a 0.5pp revision, plausibly rounding or late-registering incorporations backfilling the denominator, and small enough to be invisible unless both publications are held side by side. Recorded on The Solo-Founder Shift as a revision rather than an error, and worth carrying as a general expectation: treat a Carta figure as accurate to roughly half a point across publications, and prefer the most recent statement of a historical value.

The 2026 report is also not an independent replication of the 2025 one. Peter Walker is on both bylines and it is the same dataset publishing its own follow-up. When it confirmed that the solo-founding jump survived into a full year, that confirmation is the instrument restating itself — which is exactly what the question asked for, and no more.

Connections#

The Solo-Founder Shift — the concept built almost entirely on this instrument, and where its denominator caveat, its series revision and its two publications are reconciled
AI Investment Story, Not Efficiency Story — both sides of what Carta can and cannot do in one place: it supplies the dilution and ownership figures that price the investment bet, and it structurally cannot supply the revenue-per-employee figures the page's tail question needs
AI-Native Startup Lifecycle — the headcount-at-round medians and the ownership ladder that give the lifecycle's "headcount and capital gates dissolve" thesis its only hard numbers
Telemetry vs. Survey Measurement — Carta is the vault's canonical receipts instrument in that split: when a founder survey and a cap-table dataset disagree in direction, the cap table is the one that was not self-reported

Sources#

The State of Solo Founding (Solo Founders Report 2025) — The State of Solo Founding, Solo Founders (Julian Weisser, Kieran Ryan) with Carta Insights (Peter Walker, Hamza Shad), 2025-12-09, empirical for the figures only — the publisher sells a Solo Founders Program and its framing is advocacy (COI disclosed in-file)
Founder Ownership Report 2026 — Founder Ownership Report 2026, Peter Walker & Kevin Dowd (Carta Data Desk), 2026-03-12, empirical. Landing-page summary only; the detailed report is behind a lead-capture form. Source for the author bios, the 2024 restatement and the gating note above
Beyond Benchmarks 2026: Five Data Sets Grounded in the Real World — Emergence Capital, Beyond Benchmarks 2026 (June 2026): the data-partner route, where Carta supplies the round-median headcount series inside a VC-published report