Exclusive: Carta’s COO to leave the company after a year
The chief operations officer of shareholder management unicorn Carta is leaving the company, according to a source familiar with the matter and then confirmed by Carta.
The COO, Tom Keiser, was previously an executive at HootSuite, Zendesk, and Gap before he joined Carta in August to oversee much of the customer-facing side of the business, including marketing, sales, and customer support. He has been with the company less than a year.
Keiser did not return multiple requests for comment. In a written statement, a Carta spokeswoman confirmed that Keiser “has made the decision to leave Carta” and specified that his last day will be Aug. 9. “Tom has made a tremendous impact in his 12 months here, including hiring new UK leadership, upleveling our global ops team, and leading major organizational shifts around our business units,” she said in the statement. “We’ll be working closely with our leadership team to ensure a smooth transition.”
Carta, founded in 2012, was once a buzzy unicorn, raising more than $1 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. At one point, the company, which helps corporate customers track ownership of their shares and manage their employee stock option plans, was valued at as much as $8.5 billion.
But the company, which has 40,000 clients, is closely intertwined with the broader startup industry, which has suffered from higher interest rates since 2022. Carta exited one of its business lines earlier this year after being publicly accused of self-dealing by one of its customers on social media. The customer had accused Carta of using his startup’s confidential data without his approval for the company’s secondaries platform, which facilitated investors and shareholders buying and selling shares of startups. Carta CEO Henry Ward initially blamed the incident on an employee, but later said the company would exit the secondary business altogether “to eliminate any concern that we are not acting in our founders’ best interests.”
Carta has also been dealing with a series of public scandals, including ongoing lawsuits with former employees alleging retaliation and harassment, among other things. In legal filings, the company has denied these claims and is fighting them in court.
Three years after its last publicly-disclosed funding round in 2021, Carta is reportedly exploring a secondary sale of its own shares that could value the company at around $2 billion—about $6.5 billion less than its last formal valuation, according to TechCrunch. The spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment about any share sale.
Keiser’s departure closely follows that of David Kim, who had overseen the company’s secondary business and who left Carta a few months ago. Carta hired a chief marketing officer, Nicole Baer, in April.
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com