African-Focussed End-to-End Fundraising Platform, Raise, Secures Investment from Valuation Software Firm, Carta

Raise, a platform that offers end-to-end fundraising solutions, has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from Carta, a San Francisco-based firm that specializes in valuation software and capitalization table management.

This is the first African investment by the U.S entity since its inception.

The company, which was founded in 2018 by Marvin Coleby and Eugene Mutai, and went public in 2020, is designed to simplify cap table management for startups and companies operating within the African ecosystem.

BitKE recently sat down with the team at Raise to talk about the company and the problem it is solving for African startups.

Raise provides a comprehensive solution for managing shareholding structure, both before and after fundraising, allowing businesses to focus on growth and build a successful future.

The number of companies onboarding on the Raise platform is increasing 60% month-on-month, according to Coleby. Raise, as of this writing, manages more than 200 cap tables with assets worth more than $400 million.

Carta is described as the world’s largest ownership platform, and is on a mission to build a global stock exchange for private companies. It has:

• Raised $1.2 billion dollars
• Scaled to two million shareholders with $2.5 trillion dollars in assets, and
• 35,000 companies onboarded

Carta is also regularly making acquisitions and investments into similar ownership products in strategic markets across the world, like Raise.

“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,” Coleby said.

“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.”

According to the Raise founder, the company is still figuring out what product-market fit will look like in African tech.

“With the Carta team, we’ve explored a bunch of different angles, and we’ll probably share some polls on Twitter so that you can tell us what we should build.”

The new partnership means Raise customers can expect several new features and improvements in the near future, including:

• Liquidity products
• Experiments with African currency settlements
• Syncing with syndicate platforms to invest directly in equity structures and cap tables
• Integrated market data from the tech ecosystem
• Relaunch of its electronic shares product

Raise is also planning to use Carta’s API and open cap table standard to provide its customers with high-quality ownership, equity, and security experiences. This will allow existing Carta customers and shareholders to sync their holdings directly to Raise and run health checks against African law and macro-economic trends.

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