Raise Shut Down. Carta Took Its Place. What African Founders Should Check Before Taking the Free Tier

Raise, the Kenyan platform known as the "Carta of Africa," shut down in September 2025 and its team moved to Carta, which is now pitching a free cap table tier directly at African founders. That free tier is real — under 25 stakeholders, under $1 million raised, signup with just an email and a certificate of incorporation — but it's the same global Carta Launch product extended to a new market, not something built for how equity actually works under Kenyan, Nigerian, or South African company law. If you were on Raise, or you're choosing a cap table tool now because Carta is suddenly the default answer, the free tier is worth taking for what it is and checking carefully for what it isn't.

Here's the actual timeline, what the free offer covers, where it stops, and what to check before you commit your cap table to it.

What happened to Raise

Raise spent seven years trying to build capital-markets infrastructure for African startups — cap tables, fundraising tools, equity management, aimed at the same gap Carta fills in the US. Carta invested in Raise in 2023, calling it Carta's first Africa investment. That relationship ended differently than most investor-portfolio stories: in September 2025, Raise announced it was shutting down, with co-founder and CEO Marvin Coleby saying the company had struggled to scale in a market where venture capital flows are still nascent and fragmented, and that building African private-equity infrastructure alone "wouldn't scale."

Coleby didn't leave the space — he joined Carta to lead product strategy across Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East. Paying Raise customers were migrated directly to Carta on their existing commercial terms, with Carta's account and customer-success teams handling onboarding. Carta framed the move as the start of a broader push to build "private capital infrastructure" for Africa: partnerships with African VC firms, law firms, auditors, and accelerators, free software for early-stage founders, and Africa-focused research once adoption is large enough to report on.

It's a clean story for Carta — buy the local incumbent's relationships, absorb its team, become the default. It's a less clean decision for a founder in Lagos or Nairobi who now has Carta as the path of least resistance, whether or not Carta was ever built with their company structure in mind.

What the free tier actually is

The free offer isn't an Africa-specific product. It's Carta Launch — the same free cap table tier Carta runs for any early-stage company globally, extended to APAC and MENA back in May 2025 and now marketed into Africa through the Raise transition. The limits are the same everywhere: under 25 stakeholders, under $1 million raised, no card required to sign up.

Within those limits, it's a genuine working product, not a stripped-down trial: a real cap table, SAFE and option tracking, the same underlying infrastructure Carta's paid tiers run on. For a two-founder company that hasn't issued options to anyone yet, that's a perfectly reasonable place to start tracking ownership for free.

The limits arrive faster than they sound. Twenty-five stakeholders covers co-founders, every early hire's option grant, one or two advisors, and the SAFE holders from a single oversubscribed pre-seed round — a company can clear that count before its first priced round. One million dollars raised is even easier to cross: a $600k pre-seed plus a $450k bridge gets there without anyone calling it a "real" round. Once either line is crossed, the account moves to Carta's paid ladder — plans that start in the thousands of dollars a year and add a per-stakeholder fee on top, priced for a company that looks like a Delaware seed round, not necessarily for the stakeholder list a Lagos or Nairobi company actually has.

Where the fit breaks, regardless of price

Price aside, Carta's product is built around a specific company shape: a Delaware C-corp, board consent as the default governance mechanism, and a 409A valuation to set option strike prices. None of those three things is how most African startups are actually incorporated or governed.

Take the pool problem specifically. Kenya's Companies Act, 2015 doesn't recognize an unissued "option pool" the way Delaware law does — there's no notional bucket of shares waiting in reserve for future hires. Kenyan companies get the same economic effect through an employee share trust that already holds allotted shares, with vesting and appropriation governed by the trust deed, not a cap table field labeled "pool." Carta's cap table interface assumes the Delaware version exists. It will still show you an ownership percentage, but it won't generate a grant agreement or trust structure built for how equity actually gets allocated under Kenyan law. Cap table software for Kenyan startups goes through the mechanics in more detail — the same mismatch shows up, in different forms, across Nigerian CAMA structures, South African share schemes, and most other African company-law regimes Carta wasn't built around.

Governance is the second gap. A board-consent-and-done model works if that's genuinely all your company law requires. Several African jurisdictions have their own shareholder-meeting, quorum, and resolution requirements that a pure cap-table tool — free or paid, Carta included — has no concept of enforcing or recording correctly.

And Carta's free tier is cap table only. The fundraising CRM, investor data room, and most governance tooling live in Carta's paid product, which means the free offer solves exactly one piece of what a fundraising founder actually needs, and the rest — a data room for the next round, a place to track investor pipeline, a system for board resolutions — has to come from somewhere else regardless of which cap table you land on.

What to actually check before you pick

If Raise shutting down is forcing this decision for you, or Carta's free tier is just the default you're about to take, check these before committing your records to it:

1. Does it generate documents your lawyer will accept for your actual jurisdiction? A cap table that tracks ownership percentages but can't produce a locally valid grant agreement or trust structure leaves the real legal work exactly where it was before.
2. What happens the day you cross 25 stakeholders or $1 million raised? Model that scenario now, not after it happens — know the actual plan and per-stakeholder cost you're moving to, not just that an upgrade exists.
3. Does it do anything beyond the cap table? If you need a data room, an investor CRM, or governance tracking too, a free cap table is one piece of a stack you're still assembling from multiple logins either way.
4. Who's actually helping you move your records, and how clean is your data before it moves? Raise's shutdown didn't cancel any equity that was already issued — shares, options, and SAFEs stay legally valid regardless of which software tracks them — but a migration is also the moment to reconcile the cap table against signed documents rather than copy existing errors into a new account.

For the broader case against defaulting to Carta outside the US — not Africa-specific, but the same underlying mismatch — The Best Carta Alternative for Global Founders covers it from the Delaware-assumption angle directly.

Where Govy fits

Govy isn't trying to out-fundraise Carta or out-build a continent-wide infrastructure play. It's a single tool — cap table, jurisdiction-aware ESOP contracts, fundraising CRM, a tracked investor data room served from your own Google Drive, governance tooling for shareholder resolutions — at one login and one price, built without assuming your company is a Delaware C-corp in the first place. For a founder choosing between Carta's free tier and something else right after Raise shut down, the honest trade-off is: Carta's free tier is genuinely free up to its limits, and genuinely built around US assumptions past them; Govy charges from day one and is built around the fact that your jurisdiction isn't an edge case.

What Govy won't do: 409A valuations, fund administration, or secondary-market transactions — if any of those is the actual gap in your stack, Carta or a dedicated provider is the right call for that specific piece. Govy also doesn't have Nafath/Absher identity verification or government registry integration in any market yet, African or otherwise. Worth knowing before you commit a cap table to any tool, not after.

Raise's shutdown didn't erase anyone's equity — the shares and options issued on it are still exactly as valid as they were the day before. What it removed was a system of record built for African company structures, right as Carta became the default replacement. Take the free tier if your company fits inside its limits and its assumptions. Check both before you decide it does.

See current plans at govy.tech.