More women come forward with claims of mistreatment at Carta, the startup unicorn last valued at $7.4 billion

Alexandra Rogers remembers the evening vividly. She was standing in a small hallway, waiting for the restroom, at Hi Dive bar in San Francisco. She and her sales colleagues at Carta, the equity management startup last valued at $7.4 billion, were about to head over to a Giants game, where Carta had treated its sales team to tickets.

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Rogers says she was leaning against the wall near the bathroom, with the back of her foot propped back against it. Her knee was jutted out at about a 45-degree angle, she says. That was when she alleges that Carta’s chief revenue officer, Jeff Perry, walked by, slapped his hand on her leg, squeezed it, then kept walking.

“It wasn’t something normal—definitely not professional,” Rogers says in an interview with Fortune, recounting the claims she made in a lawsuit against her former employer, Carta, and Perry in August. Rogers says she shouted Perry’s name, he turned around, and then she stared at him. “He just kind of laughed it off and walked away,” she says.

Rogers says she was interviewing for a sales manager role at the time, one that would report directly to Perry. Two months later, the evening before Rogers says she officially started the new role, she ended up sitting next to Perry at a Carta dinner, where she alleges in her lawsuit that Perry placed his hand on her leg under the table, twice, and stroked her arm above the table.

“He touched my leg again,” Rogers sent her mom in a text that evening, according to messages reviewed by Fortune.

“Who? Your boss?” her mom responded.

“CRO yes,” Rogers said. “The one i [sic] complain about.”

Rogers reported these incidents to Carta’s human resources department in June 2023, according to the lawsuit Rogers filed this summer in a California state court in San Francisco. It wasn’t long after that she alleges in her lawsuit that Carta’s CEO, Henry Ward, started behaving differently toward her. She says he started to single her out in meetings and that “he was acting very rude and disrespectful.” Rogers says her manager told her that Ward allegedly questioned her “ability to be a manager in that role because he thought [she] had an attitude” and that she told Rogers that Ward didn’t “like women with strong personalities,” according to Rogers and legal filings. Shortly after, Rogers says her manager suggested she be demoted to a sales executive role because Ward was “doubting [her] ability,” Rogers said. When Rogers asked for specific examples, she said she was offered none. In July, Rogers was laid off as part of a broader reduction in staff that impacted the sales department. In August, Rogers filed a harassment and retaliation lawsuit.

A Carta spokeswoman, on behalf of the company, Ward, and Perry, declined to comment on the record. In legal filings, Carta and Perry vehemently denied all of these allegations. Perry said in an answer to the complaint on behalf of himself that he “never at any time interacted with Rogers in a sexual or inappropriate manner, never touched her inappropriately, and never harassed her in any way.” Perry filed a defamation cross complaint against Rogers, alleging that she had “targeted Perry” and “began to create evidence to smear him and his reputation with false statements” when her job was under threat. Prior to the defamation counterclaim being filed, Perry’s lawyer sent a letter to Rogers’ counsel, expressing her intent to bring “malicious prosecution” claims against Rogers. (Rogers has not yet responded to the counterclaim in court, but her attorney says of the claim: “These arguments are straight out of the defense victim-blaming toolbox…We remain confident that any jury looking at the facts will side with Allie.”)

Lawsuits like Rogers’ are rare in the tightly knit, still male-dominated world of venture capital and startups, where nondisclosure agreements are prevalent and settlements typically precede public accusations. It’s still infrequent that women go public with sexual harassment or gender discrimination claims, whether via litigation or otherwise—even after the high-profile, three-year Kleiner Perkins case from 2012, filed by Ellen Pao against her employer that she ultimately lost, but that helped lay ground for the #MeToo movement.

Which makes Carta—an equity management software platform that has become one of the industry’s unicorn darlings—unusual. Since 2020, the startup (which boasts board members and investors like a16z’s Marc Andreessen, Silver Lake Partners’ Joe Osnoss, and Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Will Kohler) has had four women come forward with claims of mistreatment, gender discrimination, or retaliation at the company, either via litigation or published statements.

In addition to Rogers, there’s Emily Kramer. In 2020, Kramer, Carta’s former vice president of marketing, filed a gender discrimination and retaliation lawsuit that was ultimately settled earlier this year. That same year, Andrea Walne—now Andrea Lamari—who had overseen Carta’s second