Raise, a Kenyan company that provides an end-to-end fundraising platform, has announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Carta, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in capitalization table management and valuation software. Founded in 2018 by Marvin Coleby and Eugene Mutai, Raise launched its alpha version in 2019 and went public in June 2020.
The platform offered by Raise is designed to simplify cap table management for startups and companies operating within the African ecosystem, providing a comprehensive solution for managing shareholding structure, both before and after fundraising, allowing businesses to focus on growth and building a successful future.
Carta, which is attempting to build a global stock exchange for private companies, is the world’s largest ownership platform, having raised $1.2 billion dollars and scaled to two million shareholders, $2.5 trillion dollars in assets, and onboarded 35,000 companies. Carta regularly makes acquisitions and investments into similar ownership products in strategic markets across the world.
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Marvin Coleby, co-founder of Raise, expressed excitement about the partnership with Carta, stating, “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.”
Raise plans to use the funding from Carta to offer liquidity products and experiments with African currency settlements; syncing with syndicate platforms across the ecosystem to invest directly into equity structures and cap tables; integrated market data from the tech ecosystem; and a relaunch of its electronic shares product.
In addition, Raise plans to leverage Carta’s API and the open cap table standard it is building to provide world-class ownership, equity, and security experiences for customers. Existing Carta customers and shareholders are able to sync their holdings directly to Raise and run health checks against African law and macroeconomic trends.
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Coleby also mentioned that they are still trying to figure out what product-market fit will look like in African tech, but they have explored different angles with the Carta team, and they will probably share some polls on Twitter to get feedback from the public.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard