What are the common challenges startups face in equity tokenisation?

The most common challenges include navigating FCA regulatory requirements, selecting the right tokenisation platform, structuring the legal framework for tokenised equity, educating investors unfamiliar with digital securities, and ensuring compliance with the UK Digital Securities Sandbox rules.

What are tokenisation platforms and how do they work?

Tokenisation platforms are regulated technology providers that convert equity or other assets into digital tokens on a blockchain or distributed ledger. In the UK, platforms operating under FCA oversight include those participating in the Digital Securities Sandbox. They handle the technical issuance, custody, and transfer of tokenised securities.

What financial insights should founders know before tokenising equity?

Founders should understand the cost structure of tokenisation (legal, platform, and compliance fees), the valuation implications of fractional ownership, how tokenised equity differs from traditional equity crowdfunding, and the tax treatment of digital securities under UK law.

What investor strategies apply to tokenised equity?

Investors in tokenised equity can benefit from fractional ownership of high-value assets, improved liquidity through secondary market trading on regulated platforms, portfolio diversification across early-stage UK startups, and participation in deals previously accessible only to institutional investors.

What is the UK regulatory landscape for equity tokenisation?

The UK regulatory landscape is governed primarily by the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) and HM Treasury. Key frameworks include the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, the Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS), and ongoing FCA consultations on the treatment of tokenised securities. The UK is positioning itself as a global leader in regulated digital securities.

What is equity tokenisation?

Equity tokenisation is the process of converting ownership rights in a company into digital tokens recorded on a blockchain or distributed ledger. These tokens represent shares or equity stakes and can be transferred, traded, or held digitally, subject to regulatory compliance. In the UK, tokenised equity is treated as a regulated financial instrument under FCA oversight.

London Tech Week's AI Billions Sharpen the Founder Access Question

Name: London Tech Week 2026
Start: 2026-06-08
End: 2026-06-10
Location: Olympia

Shawn Jhanji
Jun 15
10 min read

Updated: Jun 16

The headline numbers from Olympia were enormous. The question worth asking, as a founder weighing a raise or an investor weighing a cheque, is who they actually reach.

London Tech Week ran from 8 to 10 June at Olympia, and it closed with the loudest set of capital announcements the UK has produced in years. More than 30,000 people moved through the halls. The Prime Minister opened with a 1.1 billion pound AI compute strategy, including 400 million pounds for specialist chips. The Mayor of London added 12 million pounds to help small firms in the capital adopt AI. AMD pledged 2 billion pounds over five years. Nebius committed 1.7 billion pounds to build AI capacity. Microsoft put a reported 30 billion dollar figure on its UK push. By one count, UK AI startups have already raised 8.2 billion pounds in the first half of 2026.

That is a genuinely good week for British technology, and it is worth saying so plainly, because the instinct to find the cloud around every silver lining helps no one. Sovereign compute matters. Talent staying in Britain matters. A government leaning in, after years of polite indifference, matters.

But sit with the shape of the money for a moment, not just the size of it. And sit with the tone of the week, because that told its own story.

The opening set a tone it did not need to

The week began on a stage with the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London, and an audience full of the people actually building technology companies in this country. It was a rare open goal. A chance to say, without qualification, that Britain is a global hub and a magnet for innovation, that this is the best place in Europe to build, and that the prize is a generation of companies that change things.

Instead, in line with the current mood in Number 10, much of the headline address was given over to a lecture and a warning. Tech firms were told they had three months to prevent children accessing, creating and sharing harmful material or face new legislation, with the Prime Minister telling the room that the pace of change cannot be an excuse for harm and that nobody is getting a free pass. Protecting children online is an entirely legitimate priority and not one to wave away. But when the most senior political engagement with the sector in a year leads with risk and enforcement rather than possibility, the signal travels. A room that arrived ready to be inspired was, in large part, told off.

The mood lifted later. Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity gave one of the week's standout sessions, framed as "AI is the Computer," and it was full of possibility and outreach rather than threat. That is the register the opening could have struck and chose not to.

The shape of the money

Almost all of the capital announced is flowing to one layer of the economy. Compute. Chips. Data centres. Frontier labs. The mega rounds that defined the week, Nscale's 2 billion dollar Series C among them, are bets on the picks and shovels of the AI build out. That is a rational place for capital to go. It is also a narrow one. When investment concentrates this hard at the top of the stack, it tells you very little about what is happening to the founder three years in, outside London, building something that is not an AI infrastructure play.

I spent the week walking the floor at Olympia, looking at it through two lenses at once: which of these businesses would I invite to raise capital through tokenisation, and as an investor, which would I actually back. The honest answer was sobering.

What the floor actually looked like

The show floor was overwhelmingly AI. By my rough count, something close to 95 per cent of what was on display carried an AI label. A great deal of it was thin. Plenty of stands were showing tools that were launch pending, or that any reasonably capable founder could now assemble themselves with the very models on show next door. The signal-to-noise was low.

There were exceptions that stayed with me. anythink.cloud caught my eye immediately, with a genuinely broad offer and, in Chris its founder, a brilliant and clearly articulated vision. My unexpected favourite of the week was Jet Mapper, LED lights on a map tracking real time flights across the globe, more art installation than startup, and a direct hit on a personal passion. Those are the moments worth coming for.

But too much of the week was sizzle. Games, toys, swag and selfie moments. The biggest crowds gathered around the spectacle rather than the substance. IFS, with a make your own branded baseball cap, drew one of the largest and happiest audiences on the floor, and was voted best stand by other attendees. A create your own perfume stand pulled a similar throng. It was good, too, to see people like Balbir Judge spreading genuine warmth and positivity in person. The energy was real. The problem is what was missing.

There was a structural oddity to the exhibitor mix as well. A striking share of the stands belonged to overseas development shops and agencies touting build capacity rather than to innovative UK startups, which in my mind, is not what most delegates come to Olympia to find. The practical experience grated in smaller ways too. The event app and website drew steady complaints, and the venue acoustics left several talks echoing and hard to follow. Minor issues on their own, but together they added to a sense of an event optimised for the announcement and the photo opportunity rather than for the people on the floor.

What was almost entirely absent was an honest conversation about the thing very many of the founders highlighted, and which they need: capital, and how to raise it. For all the billions trumpeted from the main stage, there was little on the floor about the real mechanics and the real difficulty of getting funded as an early stage company in 2026. And the investment figures that did circulate were warped by the gravity of the AI mega rounds, flattering the wider early stage picture while masking how hard it has become for everyone outside that narrow lane.

For the median founder, a different week

The same week gave us the evidence. Across the UK, the first half of 2026 saw roughly 15 billion dollars raised across 545 equity rounds. Strip out the handful of giants and the median experience is a market that has tightened, not loosened. Longer timelines. A higher bar for proof. Investors who, in the words of more than one person at Olympia, care less about story and more about traction. None of that is a scandal. It is a reset. But it is a reset that falls unevenly.

Ekaterina Almasque, a founding partner at BlankPage Capital, put her finger on the structural version of the problem. UK startups, she argued, are often not capitalised well enough to compete for talent, which is why people leave for the United States. Capital concentration at the infrastructure layer does not fix that. In some ways it sharpens it, because the gravity of the biggest rounds pulls attention, talent and follow on money toward a small number of companies and a single geography.

The complacency problem

Not everyone in the ecosystem clapped along. Writing in CityAM, Adam French, a partner at Antler, called the week complacency in conference form, and I think the charge lands. We wheel out the same statistics about unicorns and fintech dominance and league tables, he argued, and assume the work is done. It is not. French noted that Antler opens its UK investor deck with a slide titled "Why invest in the UK," a slide it does not need in Nairobi, Singapore or Sao Paulo. The day we can drop that slide is the day the job is done.

Two numbers from that critique deserve a wider audience. Analysis of more than 41,800 UK funding rounds shows that only 12 per cent of UK startups reach Series A, which means the early stage ecosystem is weaker than the headline startup count suggests. And the visa system, French argued, is too expensive, too slow and too complicated, quietly handing talent to France, Germany and Sweden. Several speakers across the week reached for the language of a K shaped economy, where one part climbs while another slips. Britain, with its long standing divides of class and region, has reason to be thoughtful about how a boom this concentrated is allowed to scale. Wealth generated in one square mile and held by a handful of firms does not spread on its own. It has to be built to spread.

The upside, and it is real

None of this is a reason to write the week off, and it would be unfair to. London Tech Week remains the largest gathering of its kind in Europe, and that convening power is a genuine asset. Thirty thousand people in one place creates the kind of chance encounters, introductions and partnerships that no amount of remote networking replicates, and for founders and investors alike that serendipity is often the real return on the trip and I saw this play out across the week.

The programme beyond the main stage was strong for anyone who went looking. The deep tech stages spanning space, robotics, quantum and the sciences showed a Britain with far more than chatbots to offer, and sessions like Srinivas's gave the week real intellectual weight. The presence of Imperial, Cambridge and the wider research base was a reminder that the UK's underlying advantage in deep science and talent is real and durable.

And the simple fact of the government and global capital showing up matters. After years of polite indifference, a Prime Minister, a Mayor and the likes of Microsoft, AMD and Nebius choosing to plant flags in Britain is a signal the rest of the world reads. Concentrated though it is, that attention is an asset to build on, not to dismiss.

The UK does not have a shortage of capital

It has a distribution and access problem. The money exists. It reaches some founders easily and others barely at all, and the dividing lines are stubbornly familiar: who you know, where you are based, whether you fit the pattern an investor already recognises. A week of billion pound headlines does not move those lines. If anything, a gold rush makes them more visible, because the contrast between the founders inside the room and the ones reading about it only sharpens.

So what would building it to spread actually look like?

Part of the answer is the unglamorous work the government has started: compute access, skills, grants that reach founders outside the venture funnel. Innovate UK money and similar non dilutive funding matter precisely because they do not depend on a warm introduction to a Mayfair fund. Part of it is the continued, patient effort by funds and angel networks to widen who gets seen in the first place.

And part of it, over a longer horizon, is of course, infrastructure. If the bottleneck is distribution rather than supply, then the mechanisms that determine how capital reaches founders are not a side issue. They are the issue.

Tokenised equity and the new PISCES framework for trading private company shares point at a version of capital formation where a founder can raise from a broader pool of qualifying investors, manage a cap table without drowning in admin, and offer early backers a route to liquidity that does not require selling the whole company. For investors, the same architecture widens access to a private market that has been gated by relationships and minimum cheque sizes for decades. That model is still young. It will not undo regional inequality on its own, and it is not a substitute for the compute and skills investment announced last week. But it speaks directly to the part of the problem the mega rounds leave untouched: not how much capital exists, but who can reach it and on what terms.

That is the thread worth holding onto as the dust from Olympia settles. The capital is real. The ambition is real. The open question, the one no pledge answered and no main stage speech addressed, is whether the next phase of British technology is built to widen access or simply to deepen it for those who already have it. The answer won’t come from the size of the cheques. It will come from the architecture underneath them, and from whether we can finally drop the "Why London" slide for good.

Key Takeaways

London Tech Week 2026 ran from 8 to 10 June and produced a wave of capital announcements, including a 1.1 billion pound government AI compute strategy, 2 billion pounds from AMD, 1.7 billion pounds from Nebius and a reported 30 billion dollar Microsoft commitment.
The opening leaned on enforcement and child online safety rather than the positive case for British tech, a missed chance to inspire the room. Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity later struck the note of possibility the main stage did not.
The show floor was roughly 95 per cent AI, much of it thin and launch pending, heavy on spectacle and light on any honest conversation about how founders actually raise capital.
A large share of exhibitors were overseas development shops and agencies rather than UK startups, and delegates reported app, website and venue acoustic problems, reinforcing a sense of an event built for announcements over founders.
Almost all of the money is concentrated at the infrastructure layer, while the median UK founder faces a tighter market, longer timelines and a higher proof bar. The wider funding figures are flattered by the AI mega rounds.
Critics including Antler's Adam French called the week complacency in conference form, noting only 12 per cent of UK startups reach Series A and a visa system losing talent abroad.
The upside is real: Europe's largest tech gathering, genuine convening power, strong deep tech and research content, and the government and global capital choosing to show up after years of indifference.
The UK's core problem is distribution, not supply. Tokenised equity and the PISCES framework speak to the access problem for founders and investors alike, though they complement rather than replace investment in compute and skills.