How Carta Uses Procurement Intelligence to Move Faster and Negotiate Stronger Deals
Key results
About Carta
Carta provides software and services for private capital, supporting more than 50,000 companies across over 160 countries. With more than 1,700 employees globally, the company helps businesses, investors, and funds manage equity, ownership, and private market workflows.
Industry: Private capital technology
Organization size: 1,700+ employees
Use case: Procurement intelligence, benchmarking, and negotiation support
Creating leverage for a small procurement team
Carta’s procurement team is focused on helping the business move quickly while controlling costs, strengthening negotiations, and giving stakeholders the information they need to make informed supplier decisions.
With a small team supporting a large global organization, deal volume and competing priorities can put pressure on its capacity. The challenge is particularly noticeable with suppliers Carta does not negotiate with regularly, including those with multi-year terms.
Carta may negotiate with a particular supplier only once every few years. Tropic, however, may work with that same supplier several times in a single quarter. That repeated exposure gives Carta current benchmarks, supplier-specific experience, and proven negotiation strategies it would be difficult to develop internally for every vendor.
Taylor Urbany
Head of Procurement at Carta
Adding flexible support without adding headcount
Carta initially partnered with Tropic for price benchmarking and negotiation services. Tropic became a resource and release valve for the internal team, providing additional capacity to support negotiations and renewals when needed.
This gave Carta flexible access to procurement support without having to hire additional people to accommodate the increase in deal volume.
Taylor Urbany
Head of Procurement at Carta
From added capacity to everyday intelligence
Over time, Carta’s use of Tropic expanded from a primarily services-led relationship into a broader intelligence partnership.
Today, the team accesses approximately 50 Tropic insights each month and uses several capabilities to support negotiations it manages directly:
- Price benchmarking: Carta uses current market data to enter negotiations informed and prepared, secure strong pricing on initial deals, and maintain favorable terms at renewal.
- MCP connector: The team uses Tropic’s MCP connector to quickly gather benchmarking information and enhance the internal skills and workflows it has built to prepare for renewals and negotiations.
- Advisory Consults: When a negotiation reaches a blocker, Carta can consult Tropic’s experts to validate whether the supplier has more room to move or whether its offer is consistent with other recent deals.
This combination lets Carta retain control of its negotiations while drawing on Tropic’s data and experience when it needs additional context.
Cooper Brown
Procurement Manager at Carta
Spending less time preparing and knowing where to push
Before a negotiation, Carta can quickly review a supplier’s typical tactics, current market position, and the levers most likely to work. That preparation helps the team feel informed without having to spend time researching each supplier independently, reducing overall negotiation preparation time by 50% or more.
The intelligence also helps Carta determine where to keep pushing and when a vendor may have reached a genuine limit.
During a recent negotiation, Carta reached a blocker after several negotiation tactics failed to move the vendor. Through an Advisory Consult, Tropic helped Carta organize its options and confirmed that a particular vendor had adopted a firmer approach to negotiations.
That context helped Carta focus on realistic opportunities and give the business a recommendation grounded in current market behavior. Across the negotiation, Tropic identified a savings opportunity 21 percentage points above the savings Carta had initially secured.
