Carta Mobile
Empowering employees to accept grants, track vesting, exercise options, and manage their equity on the go.
Overview
Most people's first encounter with equity is confusing. You join a startup, sign some paperwork, and somewhere in there you're told you own a small, theoretical slice of the company. Congratulations. Now what?
Carta is the platform that answers that question: cap tables, valuations, fund admin, the works. The mobile app is the piece that puts equity information in employees' hands. I worked on the experience for everyday stakeholders: the people who got a grant letter and a Carta invite.
Where it started
Carta's web product is built for admins. Dense, powerful, oriented around the people running the cap table. The mobile app serves the other side: the employee checking vesting on the train, the early hire wondering what their shares might be worth, the ex-employee trying to decide whether to exercise before a deadline.
These people don't log in every day. They log in when something is happening. Every session carries some weight.
The design challenge
Equity is one of those topics where the complexity is the product. Vesting schedules, exercise windows, strike prices — you can't flatten it into a single number without losing something important. But you also can't dump a spreadsheet onto a phone screen and call it done.
The job was finding the line between clarity and completeness, for people checking between meetings, not at a desk with a calculator.
What grew from there
Over time, the app went from a read-only window into Carta to a place where people could actually do things: simulate exercising options, accept grants, understand multi-currency holdings. Tens of millions of dollars in options now get exercised from a phone, across thousands of companies and millions of employees. Each release closed a gap between the mobile experience and the decisions people needed to make.
The through-line stayed the same: meet people where they are, not where a finance team assumes they are.
What I learned
Trust is load-bearing in a financial product. When someone's looking at a number that represents a real chunk of their net worth, every detail matters - the alignment of decimal points, the copy on the confirmation button, the freshness of the data. People feel uncertainty in interfaces before they can name it. In this kind of product, uncertainty is the thing that makes someone close the app and open their laptop instead.