Raise Wanted To Be Africa’s Carta. Now It’s Shutting Down As Its CEO Joins The Real Thing

Raise, once dubbed Africa’s answer to Carta, is winding down after seven years of building a homegrown capital markets tech firm, and its founder is heading over to the exact company it paralleled.

Marvin Coleby, Raise’s co-founder and CEO, recently announced on LinkedIn that the startup he sketched “on a napkin in 2017” will close. Raise onboarded thousands of startups, digitised billions in equity, and operated across more than 18 African markets.

“Some of the darkest and best days of my life were spent building Raise over these 7 years,” he wrote. But after years of experimentation, Raise “never quite found the right business model for venture. Private equity made the most sense, but doing that alone wouldn’t scale.”

The next chapter, as Coleby sees it, begins with Carta. Back in 2023, Carta made its first African investment in Raise, sparking a shared vision of equity access “everywhere.” Now, Coleby will lead product for Asia, the Middle East, and Africa at Carta, and Raise’s customers will be migrated over.

The platform gained legs after Coleby got backing from Consensys and Binance and bought a one-way ticket to South Africa, where he says he arrived with just USD 20.00 and an idea. But it struggled to scale in a continent where venture capital flows are still nascent and fragmented. Moving operations into Carta’s infrastructure gives the vision—and the clients—global reach.

Raise played a role in Africa’s startup growth. By mid-2020, its alpha platform had facilitated over USD 20 M in fundraising. By early 2021, it had onboarded more than 200 companies, handled equity worth USD 150 M, and supported startups valued at over USD 90 M. Early stage funds like Microtraction, 500 Startups, and CRE Ventures backed the idea. It helped notable startups such as Nestcoin, Numida, Accrue, and Workpay.

That credibility helped Carta take the leap. The U.S. software unicorn—founded in 2012 and used by tech titans like Slack and Affirm—was looking to expand its global footprint. With African markets among the fastest-growing private investment regions, a local partner with deep roots made sense.

“Raise’s mission is now complete and will be carried forward through my time at Carta,” Coleby wrote. For customers, that means free users move to Carta Launch; paid users transition directly to Carta. It means the tech they already rely on lives on, but in a different context.

In practical terms, Carta gains the brains that built motile, Africa-tailored equity software across borders. Founders and investors across Nairobi, Lagos, and capitals beyond now have a simplified path into Carta’s global system.

But it’s also a reminder of the challenges African fintechs face when building insular platforms that need cross-border scale. Raise’s journey, from a napkin sketch to USD 5 B in equity digitised, as the CEO noted, reflects both ambition and constraint, as building local infrastructure can sometimes mean outgrowing one’s own ecosystem.

Feature Image Credits: Pariti