Carta, the nine-year-old, San Francisco-based cap table management and valuation software company, just raised $500 million in its eighth round of funding, at a $7.4 billion valuation. That’s more than double where the company was valued eight months ago when it closed its seventh round of funding at a valuation of $3.1 billion.
With so much money flooding into privately held companies, giant leaps in valuation are no longer all that notable. What’s different about this particular story is how Carta’s new valuation was established, which it says was to run an auction using its own trading platform to sell $100 million of its shares to secondary buyers, then