Reimagining fund closings

Closings is a paid product that allows General Partners (GPs) to raise funds from Limited Partners (LPs) and sign the subscription documents in Carta. In 2022, I led the redesign of Carta's Closings LP experience, transforming how they navigate the fund closing process. By creating adaptive workflows for both first-time individual investors and sophisticated institutional users, we reduced completion time by 60%, facilitated over $5 billion in capital deployment while saving 65,838 staff hours across our client base.

Background

Since the MVP launch in 2021, most of the product improvements had been on GP experience, and the LP experience had been neglected. By 2022, the platform had gained significant traction in the emerging GP market, processing $3 billion in capital and serving 10,000 unique LPs. However, despite this growth, the LP closing experience had become a bottleneck in our user acquisition and retention strategy.

The closing process represents most LPs' first interaction with Carta, making it a critical touchpoint for building long-term relationships for GPs, and driving the network effects that power Carta platform. With the private markets becoming more accessible to individual investors, we needed an experience that could serve investors with different levels of sophistication, especially first-time individual LPs.

Problem

 The LP Closings process can be broken down into 3 parts:

  • Select an existing, or create a new portfolio: This is critical step for investors who already had experience with Carta before, in which case most of their subscription info can be pre-filled

  • Complete investor questionnaire: An investor questionnaire is a long form used to gather information about a potential or existing investor. Its main goal is to assess the investor’s financial situation, investment goals, risk tolerance, and legal eligibility to participate in certain investments. 

  • Review and sign Limited Partnership Agreement (LPA): The LPA is the foundational legal document that defines the rights, responsibilities, and relationships between the GPs and LPs in an investment fund. By the time an LP completes the investor questionnaire on Carta, the terms of the LPA are typically already being discussed offline. At this stage, LPs are generally just expected to review and sign the LPA (and any side letters) as part of the subscription package.

In the old experience of the Investor questionnaire, users faced a 16-step linear process filled with legal jargon and Carta-specific terminology that confused new investors while frustrating experienced ones. This is the part that LPs spend most time on Carta closings, and thus the main focus of this redesign. 

Users

There’re two primary user segments within the LP users. 

First-Time Individual Investors

  • Demographics: Tech professionals, entrepreneurs, high-net-worth individuals new to private market investing

  • Goals: Make informed investment decisions, understand legal protections, feel confident about the process 

  • Pain points: Overwhelmed by legal terminology, unclear about why information is required, lack of educational resources 

  • Quote: "I want to understand what I am signing for. I want explanations and support in a digestible way. I don’t want to involve a lawyer if possible, but I don’t want to mess things up."

Institutional Investors & Wealth Managers 

  • Demographics: Professional wealth managers, family offices, institutional LPs managing multiple client investments 

  • Goals: Process investments efficiently, maintain compliance, collaborate with legal/tax advisors

  • Pain points: Repetitive data entry, inability to delegate tasks, inefficient collaboration workflows

  • Quote: "When your system asks me the same questions I answered last month for the same client, you're wasting my time and my clients' money."

Research

I conducted comprehensive research to understand the full scope of user needs:

  • 6 user testing sessions across both primary personas

  • UX audit of the existing LP experience documenting every interaction and pain point

  • Competitive analysis of 9 fund closing platforms

  • Analysis of 600+ direct LPs feedback comments from NPS surveys

  • Weekly stakeholder interviews with our internal legal and implementations team

Key Insights

Experienced LPs have a significantly different experience with our product than Inexperienced LPs.
Experienced LP: Easy/intuitive. Best product in the market.
Inexperienced LPs: Overwhelming. Guessing on answers. Looking up definitions.

Too many steps, too much text, too much repetitive data entry.
Form fields aren’t intuitive (street address, country, phone number); too much jargon - both Carta jargon (portfolio) and industry jargon (QP/QC); Too US-centric.

Poor before & after experience and no support for collaboration

The invitation process is confusing. “I can’t invite my wealth manager to fill it out for me”.
No onboarding experience for new LPs; Task persists even when there are no more action items; No visibility into the progress for LPs after submission.

Design explorations

Based on research insights, I started out by studying and understanding the questionnaire itself, and grouping the related questions into logical sections while maintaining clear progress. Then I map out the order of questions and their sections, in order for them to read naturally.

Apart from trying to simplify the questionnaire, I also explored a few design concepts:

  • Contextual education: In-flow sidebar that doesn't interrupt the core workflow

  • New workflow to only surface portfolio selection to relevant existing users (the before experience)

Iterations

Throughout the design process, I conducted multiple rounds of usability testing and worked closely with our Legal and Content teams to ensure questions were both easy to understand and legally accurate.

Solutions

I redesigned the closing experience around 5 core improvements:

Differentiated welcome experience

Created distinct entry points for new and existing users to reduce cognitive load and set appropriate expectations:

  • New users received educational onboarding explaining the fund closing process, what to expect, and what documents they'd need to prepare

  • Existing users were immediately shown their pre-filled portfolio selection with previously entered information

Simplified information architecture

Restructured the 16-step process into 4 logical decision points that matched users' mental models

Adaptive UX

Implemented branching logic that showed only relevant questions and dynamic helper based on previous responses. This eliminated confusion from irrelevant questions while serving both user types effectively.

Contextual educational widget

Designed an in-app help sidebar that provided:

  • Legal term definitions in plain language

  • Educational widget tailored to user type

  • "What to have ready" preparation checklists

  • Document preview capabilities

The sidebar could be easily dismissed by sophisticated users but provided confidence-building support for newcomers.

Enhanced collaboration tools

Created secure in-app collaboration features allowing investors to:

  • Invite lawyers, accountants, or wealth managers to fill out or review documents

  • Seamless experience for multiple signatories to sign in-app

  • Create visibility for GPs to track the LP progress

Bigger picture

During the design process, I also created and presented several artifacts to get key BU stakeholders on board with the bigger picture: the Closing tool in relation to LP’s entire Carta experience.

Impact

In 1-year of launch, the redesigned Closings tool has:

  • Reduced LP completion time by 60%

  • +15% of all LPs subscribed with prefilled information

  • Supported 1,010 entities with fundraising

  • Facilitated $5,078,748,235 in capital closed

  • Processed 21,946 fund/SPV commitments

  • Saved 65,838 staff hours across our client base


Beyond metrics, this project:

  • Kickstarted Carta's LP ↔ GP flywheel, creating network effects in our ecosystem

  • Moved Carta up the fundraising funnel, expanding both GP and LP networks

  • Inspired other Carta designs, including Equity Financing and Employee Onboarding experiences

Takeaways

Cross-functional collaboration from day one prevents last-minute pivots

By embedding myself with Legal and Content teams from the start, I discovered that regulatory constraints weren't roadblocks. They were often design opportunities that led to more innovative solutions than I would have found working in isolation.

Users want comprehension, not simplification

When I watched first-time investors spend minutes puzzling over legal terms, I realized they weren't asking for less information—they were asking for better explanations. Many times, successful design decisions come from adding context rather than removing complexity.