Carry acquired by AngelList and Lettuce Financial in split deal — founder Ankur Nagpal on building for solopreneurs

Carry's split exit

Ankur Nagpal built Carry over three and a half years as a fintech platform for solopreneurs — solo 401(k) accounts, tax tools, and personal finance education — and has now sold it in two pieces simultaneously. The core business and team went to AngelList; the retirement platform went separately to Lettuce Financial, which handles tax, bookkeeping, payroll, and insurance for the self-employed.

Carry reached $4M ARR, 25 people, and $250M in assets under custody before the deal. Nagpal frames those numbers honestly: a solid business, but not the kind generating AI-era multiples. The split structure reflects that AngelList wanted Carry's product-building and marketing capabilities to launch new private-market financial products, not a retirement custody business it had no natural use for. Lettuce was the logical home for that asset, and most of the Carry team follows the retirement platform there.

“The overall company is bought by AngelList, which is a platform I've had a long standing relationship with. They saw the marketing engine we've built, they saw our ability to build and launch financial products, and they wanted to buy us to build and launch new financial products to make the private markets more accessible. We also partnered with a company called Lettuce Financial — that's where we're selling the retirement platform.”

The go-to-market

Carry never spent on paid acquisition. Growth came through a personal finance newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers and consistent Twitter presence, built around explaining the tax code to self-employed people. The solo 401(k) was Nagpal's anchor product — a plan where contributions compound tax-free, the account can hold any asset class, funds can roll into a Roth IRA, and owners can borrow against it. Carry helped roughly 4,000 individuals set up retirement plans under that structure.

The AngelList thesis

Nagpal argues that private-market wealth creation remains inaccessible to most retail investors while companies stay private longer and longer. The pitch is that the regulatory framing of "investor protection" has become hollow when prediction market contracts and speculative tokens are freely tradeable. AngelList's plan, as Nagpal describes it, is to build investor-friendly products that open up some of that upside more broadly.

He flags that a small number of major upcoming IPOs will test whether the disconnect between battered public-market valuations and still-elevated private valuations can hold. Anthropic and OpenAI already have unofficial secondary markets liquid enough to function like public prices, and Nagpal sees broader private-market access as inevitable from there.

Lettuce customers keep the same retirement platform with added services layered on. Nagpal stays involved with Lettuce in an advisory capacity while spending most of his time at AngelList.