Most wealth-building software still assumes the user has a W-2, an employer match, and an HR portal. Carry is betting that the fastest-growing slice of American earners has none of those things.
The New York company, founded in 2022 and backed by Y Combinator [Crunchbase], sells tax-advantaged accounts and financial planning tools to people who run their own books: creators, freelancers, consultants, and startup founders with a side LLC. Its flagship wedge is the Solo 401(k), the retirement account available to self-employed workers without full-time staff, which Carry packages alongside tax filing, bookkeeping, and investing [CB Insights]. The pitch to a Schedule C earner is that the same dashboard that holds the brokerage account also runs the tax planning that justifies the contribution.
The company was called Ocho until October 2023, when co-founder Ankur Nagpal announced the rebrand to Carry on X, writing that "as our platform and ambitions have grown, we needed a new name that better reflected our vision" [X, Oct 2023]. The original Ocho launch in December 2022 led with the Solo 401(k) as a consumer product, framed by TechCrunch at the time as an attempt to "rethink personal finance for business owners" [TechCrunch, Dec 2022]. Two years in, the product surface has widened to a stack that touches taxes, bookkeeping, and investments [smartbranding.com].
The bet
The wedge matters because the incumbents in this category are not other startups. Carry lists Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and E-Trade among its competitors, and on the narrow question of "where do I open a Solo 401(k)," those three plus a handful of specialist administrators have owned the shelf for a generation. Carry's own published comparisons of Solo 401(k) providers acknowledge as much, walking readers through the trade-offs between brokerage-run plans and third-party administrators [Carry, 2024].
The argument for a software company in this seam is that the brokerages are not actually selling a workflow. They sell an account. The tax strategy that makes the account worth opening, how much to contribute, whether to elect Roth treatment, how to coordinate with a SEP or a Mega Backdoor, sits with an accountant the customer may or may not have. Carry's product claim is that the planning, the filing, and the account live in one place [CB Insights]. If that bundle holds, the company is not competing with Schwab on custody fees. It is competing with the absence of a CFO.
Why it could be big
The self-employed population in the United States is large and growing, and the share of that population earning enough to care about tax-advantaged accounts has expanded with the creator economy and the post-2020 surge in single-member LLCs. Y Combinator's early backing [Crunchbase] signals that the firm sees Carry as a category bet rather than a niche tool, and the company's expansion from a single-product Solo 401(k) launch into a broader financial stack is consistent with a roadmap that ends at something closer to a personal Carta for high-earning solopreneurs.
The disclosed traction is early but directionally encouraging. According to the company's LinkedIn, Carry supports more than 500 business owners, manages over $5 million in invested assets, and has crossed $200,000 in ARR [LinkedIn]. Those are seed-stage numbers, not Series B numbers, but the unit in question, a customer who pays for ongoing tax and retirement software, tends to renew if the tax filing actually gets done.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Business owners on platform | 500 users |
| Invested assets | 5 $M |
| ARR | 0.2 $M |
The team and traction
Carry was founded by Lucas Stettner, Jaiya Gill, Julia Karls, and Alejandro Roman [The Org]. The company reports a core team of 10 on LinkedIn, with PitchBook showing a wider footprint of 48 across contractors and extended staff [LinkedIn, PitchBook]. The product library, including detailed provider comparisons published into 2026 planning cycles [Carry, 2026], suggests an in-house content and tax-research function that doubles as a customer acquisition channel: the same articles that rank for "best Solo 401(k)" funnel readers into Carry's own account-opening flow.
The honest counterfactual
The bear case is straightforward. Schwab, Fidelity, and E-Trade offer Solo 401(k)s at zero account fee, and a sophisticated self-employed earner with an existing accountant may not need a software layer on top [Carry, 2024]. If Carry's customer is the person who would otherwise not open the account at all, the addressable market is real but the willingness to pay is sensitive to whether the tax savings clearly exceed the subscription. The bull answer, visible in the product direction, is that the bundle of filing plus planning plus custody is what justifies the price, and that the brokerages have shown no appetite to build the planning layer themselves. The rebrand from Ocho to Carry [X, Oct 2023] also reflects a widening of scope from one account type to a broader wealth platform, which is the version of the company that earns a venture-scale outcome if it works.
What to watch
The next twelve months should answer two questions. First, does the ARR curve steepen as Carry adds account types beyond the Solo 401(k), the SEP, the cash balance plan, the HSA, into a coherent tax-year workflow. Second, does a priced round follow the seed disclosed in December 2022 [Crunchbase], and at what valuation: a Series A in this category would signal that at least one institutional investor believes the bundle thesis beats the brokerage default. A partnership with a creator platform or a payroll provider serving 1099 workers would be the clearest distribution unlock.
If you are a Solo 401(k) holder today, here is the question worth asking: would you pay a software company to do the tax planning that your brokerage will not?