Series C+ Tender Offers Hit 44 in a Half-Year, 3.1x the 2023 Count, in a Study by a Firm That Sells Them

Series C-and-later tender offers rose from 14 in the first half of 2023 to 44 in the first half of 2026, a 3.1x increase, according to a study published by NewView Capital from Carta data. The median size stayed below $40 million in every period. The study's publisher is also a seller of the service: on September 22 NewView announced a partnership with Carta to run these deals.

That conflict does not make the numbers wrong. It does decide how to read them, and the useful parts are the ones that cut against the sales pitch.

What the study counted

The dataset is anonymised data from more than 550 company-sponsored tender offers between the first half of 2021 and the first half of 2026. Different questions use different subsets: 377 to 380 tenders for participation, 248 Series C and later deals for size and timing, and 366 completed within a year of a company's latest priced round for pricing. A tender offer, as TechCrunch defines it, is a deal in which employees, and often early investors, sell part of their shares at a set price to an approved investor.

The median Series C+ tender was about $30 million in early 2022, under $7 million in the first half of 2023 and $29 million in 2026. The count tripled while the typical cheque did not grow, which points to more companies running smaller programs rather than a few running larger ones.

Who gets to sell

Employees were included in 91% of tenders, "more than any other group," in the study's words. The caps differ by group: employees get the highest median cap at 20%, while insiders and former employees get 10%, so a typical deal lets employees sell twice the share that founders, board members and executives can.

Holder group	Share of tenders including them	Median cap on shares sold
Employees	91%	20%
Insiders (founders, board, executives)	55%	10%
Former employees	53%	10%
Investors	46%	Not reported; 100% allowed in at least 1 in 4

Insiders carry the tightest limits: only one in four tenders let them sell more than 30%. Investors are least often included, and in at least one in four tenders they were allowed a full 100% exit. The study reads this as investors being "either excluded or given a path to a more complete exit." Former employees were allowed to sell everything in at least one in four deals.

1. Employees91 %
2. Insiders55 %
3. Former employees53 %
4. Investors46 %

Source: NewView Capital, Inside the Tender Offer 2026 (Carta data, 1H 2021 to 1H 2026)

Timing and price

The median gap from a company's last priced round to a tender was about 100 days, rising to 257 days in the second half of 2025. Many tenders matched the last round's price, and one in four was completed at a discount of at least 10%. The study gives no median discount, so the typical haircut is unknown.

The median company was 7.6 years old at tender in the first half of 2026. The study puts the median age at going public at 12 years. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, said to TechCrunch: "The companies are staying private for 12 to 15 years. That's not changing."

The partnership and its own numbers

The PR Newswire release says Carta administered more than 70 tender offers in the first half of 2026, representing $3 billion in volume, its strongest first half on record. That is above $42 million a deal on average, against a Series C+ median of $29 million. The two counts have different scopes, since Carta's covers every stage, and the gap is what a few large deals pull up in a mean.

The release also says NewView and Carta have existing commercial relationships, including this collaboration, and may receive related economic benefits. It says several company-sponsored tenders are already underway through it.

Company	Tender	Date
Hightouch	Tender at a $1.3 billion valuation	2025
Decagon	First tender at $4.5 billion	March 2026
Wayve	$85 million employee tender at $8.5 billion	June 2026
ElevenLabs	Two tenders in under a year	Reported September 30, 2026

What would confirm the trend

The study itself undercuts the claim that tenders are becoming routine: only one in five companies ran more than one since 2021, with 17% running two and 4% three. Its own conclusion is that "a recurring cadence has yet to become standard practice."

Viswanathan calls early liquidity a "win-win-win" for workers, companies and investors. The company side can be checked against price, and a quarter of deals priced 10% or more below the last round. The public alternative is an IPO, where filings test private marks, as in Anthropic's S-1; acquisitions test them too, as the boom-era valuations comparison shows.

The next observable data point is the second-half 2026 count. If it clears 44, the trend holds. If the repeat-tender share stays near one in five, the cadence Carta describes is still a pitch.