Follow the Money Friday: The Tender Offer Trap?

In the current venture climate, the 'unicorn' badge is losing its luster. A decade ago, a billion-dollar valuation was a magnet for top-tier talent; today, it's common. With companies staying private for 12 to 15 years, employees are often left holding stock they cannot sell, creating a precarious gap between paper wealth and actual liquidity.

**OPINION:** As a skeptic of the pitch deck, I have to ask: are these tender offer shortcuts a genuine benefit for the rank-and-file, or are they a desperate play by founders to stop a talent exodus before a potential Series C crash? When the 'win-win-win' narrative starts sounding this rehearsed, it's time to look at the P&L of employee retention.

As TechCrunch first reported, NewView Capital and Carta have partnered to streamline the process of launching tender offers. These transactions allow employees and some early investors to sell a portion of their shares at a predetermined price to approved investors. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, argues that these programs are essential morale boosters and retention tools designed to prevent high-quality talent from jumping ship to public companies.

Data provided by NewView and Carta suggests a shift in the landscape. Tender offers for Series C and later-stage startups have increased threefold over the last three years. Viswanathan notes that this trend is no longer limited to the industry giants like OpenAI, Anduril, or Databricks. For example, NewView helped facilitate a tender for the marketing customization startup Hightouch at a $1.3 billion valuation last year, when the company was seven years old.

Other companies recently utilizing this liquidity lever include AI voice generator ElevenLabs—which executed two offerings in under a year—as well as self-driving developer Wayve and AI customer support startup Decagon.

Despite the push, the actual adoption rate remains modest. TechCrunch reports that only 44 such offerings were executed in the first half of 2026. While Viswanathan pitches the partnership as a way to make it easier for CEOs to manage these programs, the scarcity of these deals suggests that many founders are still hesitant to open the floodgates of liquidity.