Kenyan company Raise, an end-to-end fundraising platform, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Carta, a San Francisco-based company that specialises in capitalisation table management and valuation software.
Founded in 2018 by Marvin Coleby and Eugene Mutai, Raise launched its alpha in 2019 and went public in June of 2020.
Its platform 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.
Raise has now secured funding from Carta, the world’s largest ownership platform, which is attempting to build a global stock exchange for private companies. Carta has raised US$1.2 billion dollars and scaled to two million shareholders, US$2.5 trillion dollars in assets, 35,000 companies onboarded and regularly making acquisitions and investments into similar ownership products in strategic markets across the world.
“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,” Coleby said.
“We’re 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.”
In the meantime, Raise customers should soon expect 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.
Raise also 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.
