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The UK’s home for tokenised equity. Independent news, insight and resources for founders raising capital, investors deploying it, and the firms supporting both — as the regulation, infrastructure and opportunity converge.

The Question DAOs and Evergreen Funds Were Really Asking

  • Writer: Shawn Jhanji
    Shawn Jhanji
  • Jun 22
  • 5 min read
The numbers on who gets funded have barely moved in years. Less than 2 per cent of UK venture capital goes to all female founding teams. Black founders receive a fraction of a per cent. The British Business Bank's Small Business Equity Tracker keeps finding the same regional concentration, with the triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge absorbing the lion's share while founders elsewhere wait. None of this is new. That is rather the problem. A system that produces the same skew year after year is not having an accident. It is working as it was designed and the changes proposed while well-meaning, and seemingly significant, are not filtering through to make a difference at grass roots level. The traditional venture model has a particular shape. A fund raises a closed pool, deploys over a few years, and must return capital to its own investors within a decade. That clock drives everything. The pressure for a large exit. The preference for patterns that have paid off before. The board seats and liquidation preferences that protect the fund if things go wrong. GP - founder friction. It is a rational design. It is also one that quietly favours founders who resemble past winners and who can afford to wait years for liquidity. Over the last decade, a series of experiments tried to ask whether capital could be formed differently. Two are worth revisiting now, because the question they raised has outlived the answers they gave.

  • The numbers on who gets funded have barely moved in years.

  • Less than 2 per cent of UK venture capital goes to all female founding teams.

  • Black founders receive a fraction of a per cent.

  • The British Business Bank's Small Business Equity Tracker keeps finding the same regional concentration, with the triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge absorbing the lion's share while founders elsewhere wait.


None of this is new. That is rather the problem. A system that produces the same skew year after year is not having an accident. It is working as it was designed and the changes proposed while well-meaning, and seemingly significant, are not filtering through to make a difference at grass roots level.


The traditional venture model has a particular shape. A fund raises a closed pool, deploys over a few years, and must return capital to its own investors within a decade. That clock drives everything. The pressure for a large exit. The preference for patterns that have paid off before. The board seats and liquidation preferences that protect the fund if things go wrong. GP - founder friction. It is a rational design. It is also one that quietly favours founders who resemble past winners and who can afford to wait years for liquidity.


Over the last decade, a series of experiments tried to ask whether capital could be formed differently. Two are worth revisiting now, because the question they raised has outlived the answers they gave.


The first was the DAO. Decentralised autonomous organisations pooled capital from many contributors and tried to govern investment decisions collectively, onchain, without a traditional general partner sitting at the top. Investment DAOs in particular asked a genuinely radical question. What if the people putting in the money also made the decisions, transparently, with rules written in code rather than in a private partnership agreement? Most did not survive contact with reality in their first form and the assumptions about investors engaging in collective decision making, were mostly blown apart by low levels of active participation. Governance was clumsy. Legal wrappers were uncertain. Coordinating hundreds of strangers turned out to be slow and, at times, chaotic. As vehicles, many faded.


But look at what they were probing. They were testing whether the gatekeeping layer of venture, the small number of partners deciding who is credible, could be widened or removed. Whether transparency could stand in for private discretion. Whether a founder might reach capital without first being pattern matched by a handful of people in a handful of postcodes.


The second experiment was the evergreen fund. Rather than a fixed ten year life, evergreen vehicles hold capital open ended, recycling returns from exits into new investment rather than handing everything back on a schedule. The model is not fringe. Sequoia restructured towards a permanent capital approach in 2021. Andreessen Horowitz built its Perennial vehicle to keep holding public positions rather than distribute them. Through 2025 and into 2026, the structure has been institutionalising quickly, with a wave of new evergreen funds launched on the model.


Why does that matter for founders? Because the ten year clock is one of the quiet forces behind founder hostile terms. A fund that does not have to force an exit by a deadline can be a more patient, less coercive partner. Remove the artificial pressure to liquidate and some of the structural reasons for aggressive preferences and rushed sales soften. The evergreen experiment, unlike the DAO, is largely working, and it works precisely because it loosens the timing constraint that shapes so much else.


Here is the thread that ties them together. Both the DAO and the evergreen fund were asking how to make capital formation fairer, more flexible and less hostile to the people building. The DAO went after the gatekeeping. The evergreen fund went after the clock. Neither fully solved it. The inquiry was right.


Tokenisation and PISCES are now advancing that same inquiry in more durable, regulated form. Consider what a tokenised, PISCES enabled model actually offers. A founder can represent equity onchain, manage a cap table without the operational drag that usually demands a fund's back office, and reach a broader pool of qualifying investors within whatever regulatory perimeter applies. More than that, the UK's PISCES framework, now live and FCA regulated, allows intermittent secondary trading of private company shares. That creates something the earlier experiments could only gesture at. Liquidity for early backers without forcing a full exit on the founder.


Sit with what that changes. The reason traditional rounds hand power to institutional investors, through board control, preferred terms and liquidation preferences, is partly that those investors take illiquid, long dated risk and want protection for it. Give early supporters a regulated route to partial liquidity and the risk profile shifts. Backing a founder earlier becomes more attractive to more people. A founder who can raise incrementally, at the scaling stage, through tokenised equity and secondary windows, may not need the traditional Series A, B and C treadmill at all. And a founder who does not need that treadmill keeps more of the upside, the decisions and the relationships that matter.


This is the part too often missed. The case for tokenisation is usually sold as cheaper, faster fundraising. The deeper point is about power. It changes who holds it in a capitalised company. The DAO wanted to widen who decides. The evergreen fund wanted to remove the deadline that distorts decisions. Tokenised, PISCES enabled capital formation quietly delivers pieces of both, inside a regulatory perimeter the earlier experiments lacked.

None of this is a finished story, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. PISCES is young. Its trading windows are intermittent by design. Access is limited to institutional, sophisticated and high net worth investors and company employees, not the general public.


This is also about founder access to the right qualified investors, not about opening private markets to everyone. Tokenised equity still has to prove itself at scale. The benefits are emerging, not established.


But the direction of travel is clear enough to act on. For a decade, the most interesting people in capital formation have circled the same question from different angles. How do you fund founders without the gatekeeping, the clock and the power transfer that the traditional model treats as unavoidable? The DAOs and the evergreen funds were early, imperfect attempts at an answer. What is arriving now, tokenised equity meeting a regulated secondary market, meeting a more diverse breadth of founders, is the most durable version of that attempt yet.


If the regulatory and market infrastructure keeps maturing, the prize is not just cheaper rounds. It is a wider definition of who counts as a credible founder, and a real chance for capital to reach the founder in Leeds or Bristol who has the business but not the network.


That would be worth more than any single fund structure. It is, in the end, the question all of these experiments were really asking.


Key Takeaways

  • The skew in who gets funded has barely moved: under 2 per cent of UK VC goes to all female teams, and a fraction of a per cent to Black founders, with capital concentrated around London, Oxford and Cambridge.

  • DAOs probed the gatekeeping problem and evergreen funds attacked the ten year clock. Most DAOs faded, but the questions they raised remain live.

  • Evergreen structures are institutionalising fast, easing the exit deadline that drives many founder hostile terms.

  • Tokenisation and PISCES advance the same inquiry in regulated form, offering secondary liquidity without forcing a full exit and letting founders raise incrementally while keeping control.

  • This is about founder access to qualified investors, not retail access, and the benefits are still emerging rather than proven.

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