Carta, a unicorn that makes dashboards for managing equity investments in other unicorns is laying off staff and sniffing out a cash injection from existing backers.
Bloomberg reports that the company is seekng a $200 million investment from existing investors at a $3 billion valuation, up from 1.8B last year. Somewhat incongruent with the “growth story” picture that normally garners such a sharply higher round, Carta is laying off employees. They just axed 161 people which amounts to 10% of it’s workforce.
Which means that this ostensibly $3B company has had somewhere north of 1600 employees.
At the time of Carta’s 2019 Series E funding round, which landed them $300 million, their run rate was reported to be $50 million/year. That put their 2019 valuation at 36X (projected) sales.
Positing that their revenues somehow haven’t completely cratered like every other unicorn in existence, that means they’re now shopping themselves at a valuation of 60X trailing year’s run rate.
Let’s see if anyone bites.
