So, Can Tokenisation Make a Founder's Location Irrelevant to Whether They Can Raise?
A story suggestion landed in our inbox this week pointing to a piece in Private Markets Profile on what it called building investable regions: the idea that tokenisation can widen who is able to invest in a given market by removing geography as a barrier to access. It is a genuinely useful frame, and it raises a question we recognise but have not asked directly enough.
If tokenisation can decouple where an investor sits from what they can invest in, can it do the same for founders, decoupling where a company is based from whether it can raise?
What we know: UK growth capital remains heavily concentrated in London and the South East. That pattern shows up consistently across British Business Bank and Beauhurst reporting, we see it every year at the pitch events arranged in London for organisations based all over the country, and it is precisely the gap the Chancellor's new £150m Northern scale-up fund, announced this week, is designed to partly address.
It is also, structurally, a warm-network problem as much as a money problem. Investors back what they can see, verify and reach easily, and founders without an existing route into a fund's network start every conversation at a disadvantage that has nothing to do with the quality of their business.
What we also know, from the institutional side: tokenisation is already being used, today, specifically to solve a version of this problem for financial institutions and investors. Aberdeen Investments' newly announced partnership with Finloop Finance tokenises interests in a global private markets strategy so that professional investors in Hong Kong, who would otherwise need a direct institutional relationship with Aberdeen, can access it through a wealth platform instead.
Singapore's Project Guardian is testing the same logic across more than 40 institutions. The Private Markets Profile piece that prompted this one makes a similar case for diaspora investors and family offices with regional ties gaining access to assets they would previously have needed local presence or relationships to reach. In every one of these cases, tokenisation is functioning as a distribution and access layer that widens who can get in on the investor side.
The open question is whether the same infrastructure can be turned around to work on the founder side, and here the evidence is thinner and the case is less settled.
Tokenisation combined with intermittent, PISCES-style periodic trading windows can, in principle, let a company outside London raise from a wider, geographically unconstrained pool of qualifying investors, and let early backers access liquidity without waiting for a full exit, which in turn should make it more attractive to back an unfamiliar, non-London founder in the first place.
While not established or confirmed in written regulation, our belief here is that the SEIS and tokenisation mechanics broadly support this concept: a properly structured tokenised seed round, where the underlying share is issued and filed conventionally with Companies House as the legal source of truth, can retain SEIS relief while giving investors a potential path to liquidity well inside the traditional seven to ten year horizon, provided the first PISCES-style trading window is placed at or beyond the three year relief period.
Why hasn't crowdfunding already solved this?
It is worth asking why equity crowdfunding, which promised a version of this same decoupling a decade ago, has not closed the gap itself. Platforms such as Crowdcube and Seedrs let any UK company open a raise to investors anywhere in the country, and on paper that should have solved the discovery problem for regional founders long before tokenisation entered the conversation. In practice it has not, and the reason is instructive.
Crowdfunding campaigns succeed overwhelmingly on the strength of the audience a founder can mobilise in the first 48 hours, customers, social media followers, existing supporters, in many cases, a requirement for prior commitments to have been secured as a condition of acceptance onto the platform, rather than on cold discovery by unconnected investors browsing the platform. It substitutes one warm network for another, a personal or customer audience instead of a fund's contact book, but a pre-existing audience all the same. A founder without either starts from much the same disadvantage on a crowdfunding platform as they would in a London pitch room.
Crowdfunding has also proven a poor fit for the scale-up capital the Chancellor's Northern fund is aimed at. Retail-facing platforms operate within FCA financial promotion rules for high-risk investments and self-certified investors, which caps typical cheque sizes and campaign totals well below the £5m to £15m range that fund is targeting, and often leaves companies with large, fragmented cap tables of small shareholders that institutional investors treat as a governance cost to clean up, frequently through a nominee consolidation, before a serious growth round can close.
That is arguably one problem tokenised, PISCES-linked structures could genuinely help with, a single tokenised nominee holding in place of hundreds of individual crowdfunding certificates, but it is a settlement and administration fix, not a discovery one. The crowdfunding experience is, if anything, the clearest existing evidence for the argument this piece is making: removing geographic and access friction from the investor side alone does not automatically solve the harder problem of an unconnected founder being found and trusted in the first place.
What remains genuinely unresolved is discovery, not settlement. Today's institutional tokenisation deals, Aberdeen and Finloop included, work because an established manager with an existing investor base is making its own strategy more reachable. They do not, by themselves, solve the much harder problem facing an unconnected founder: how does a qualifying investor with no prior relationship to a company in Sunderland or Newcastle find that company's tokenised round at all, let alone trust it enough to commit capital?
Tokenisation removes friction from the transaction once an investor has decided to act. It does not yet do much to replace the sourcing, credibility and trust functions that a warm introduction from a known fund currently performs, and that remains the actual bottleneck for most regionally based founders, more than the mechanics of the cap table itself. It is also true that early stage investment decisions are less focused on the finer detail of a pitch deck and financial projections, and more on the founder and an assessment of their potential to deliver on their vision and make something happen.
Joining Up The Dots
We think that gap is solvable, but not by tokenisation alone. It would need some combination of a verifiable, portable track record layer that travels with a founder independent of who they know, PISCES trading windows scheduled early enough in a company's life to matter to seed and Series A investors rather than only late-stage ones, and custody or nominee structures robust enough to satisfy both HMRC's SEIS requirements and FCA expectations without adding new friction of their own. None of the current tokenisation platforms we have seen serving UK founders has built that discovery layer yet. A few are adjacent to it.
We will continue to put this question to the people best placed to answer it and welcome perspectives and insights from willing contributors, including from founders themselves who have tried to raise from outside the capital.
Does tokenised infrastructure genuinely change who can access capital, or does it just make the existing gatekeeping faster and cheaper to run?
Get in touch and we will publish considered responses, including ones that disagree with the framing above.
This piece is general information and an open editorial question. It is not investment or tax advice, and readers considering SEIS or PISCES-linked structures should take independent professional advice.
Key Takeaways
Tokenisation is already being used at institutional scale to widen investor access, including Aberdeen Investments and Finloop Finance's new Hong Kong distribution deal and Singapore's Project Guardian.
Equity crowdfunding promised a similar decoupling for founders a decade ago but has not delivered it, because campaigns still succeed on a founder's existing audience rather than solving cold discovery for unconnected investors.
Whether tokenised infrastructure can widen founder access in a way crowdfunding has not, letting regionally based companies raise from a broader pool without a London warm introduction, is a genuinely open question.
SEIS relief can, in principle, survive tokenisation and PISCES-style trading if the underlying share issuance and Companies House filing remain conventional and the first trading window falls at or after the three year relief point.
The unresolved problem is discovery and trust, not settlement mechanics, and no current tokenisation platform has fully solved it for unconnected, regionally based founders.
Sources:
Private Markets Profile — Building Investable Regions
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