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UK Venture Funds Turn to Evergreen Structures and GP-Led Secondaries. Case Building for Tokenised Liquidity at the Fund Level

  • Writer: Shawn Jhanji
    Shawn Jhanji
  • 2 days ago
  • 5 min read
Most of the debate about who gets funded starts and ends with the initial cheque: who wins the pitch, whose warm introduction lands, which fund says yes. It is the right place to start, but it stops the story too early. A less visible shift is under way further up the capital stack, in how venture funds themselves are structured, and it may end up mattering just as much to founders as anything happening at the term sheet stage. The problem, briefly, in data Global secondary deal volume for private assets hit a record 226 billion dollars in 2025, up 41 per cent on the previous year, with nearly half of that volume coming from general partner led transactions rather than ordinary LP to LP trades. The gravy train continues. Continuation funds, where a GP moves one or more prized assets out of an ageing fund into a new vehicle so it can keep managing them for another three to seven years, now account for roughly 75 per cent of all GP led secondary volume. Close to three quarters of the largest global private equity firms have executed at least one continuation transaction, and evergreen and rolling fund structures, these are vehicles with no fixed end date designed to hold and compound capital indefinitely, are proliferating as wealth and even retail adjacent capital looks for access to venture style returns without a ten year lock up. That is the starting point. Traditional closed end venture funds, with their fixed ten year life and pressure to exit everything on a clock that has nothing to do with a company's actual readiness, are increasingly being treated by sophisticated GPs and LPs as a structural constraint to be worked around rather than a permanent feature of the model. What's actually changing, and why it matters The balanced, evidence led case is not that continuation funds and evergreen vehicles are a cure all. They are, at bottom, a liquidity mechanism, a way for a fund's own backers to get cash out of ageing positions without forcing a premature sale of the underlying company. But that liquidity mechanism has a direct, underappreciated effect on founders, because a fund under less pressure to force an exit on a fixed timetable is a fund that can support a founder through a longer, less rushed path to scale. Venture capital as a system can often be attacked for the negative impact or not fulfilling the potential to do more and better, but the funds experimenting with evergreen and continuation structures deserve credit for building something better than the fixed ten year model that has shaped, and often distorted, founder outcomes for decades. A GP willing to hold a winning position for fifteen years rather than force a sale in year eight is, in practice, a GP better aligned with the founder sitting across the table from them. The emerging manager platforms and LP mandates that increasingly favour this flexibility, including institutional LPs such as the British Business Bank, which has repeatedly signalled support for first time and structurally innovative fund managers through its emerging manager commitments, are part of the same story: capital that is willing to back new structures, not just new founders. Where this connects to the founder capital thesis Here is the underreported angle. Almost all of the commentary on continuation funds and evergreen structures treats them as a private equity back office story, a way for GPs and LPs to manage portfolio liquidity among themselves. Very little of it asks what this pattern implies for founders directly. We think it implies quite a lot. The same structural insight that is reshaping fund liquidity, like the locking capital up for a fixed decade regardless of a company's actual readiness to exit is an inefficient, founder hostile default, is exactly the insight sitting underneath our own standing thesis on tokenised equity and PISCES enabled secondary trading. A founder building on a tokenised share register, with access to PISCES style trading windows for their own company's shares, is solving the identical problem at the company level that continuation funds are solving at the fund level: how do you give early backers, employees and investors a realistic route to liquidity without forcing a full, premature exit event that hands control to whoever is buying. Seen this way, evergreen funds, continuation vehicles and tokenised, PISCES enabled equity are not separate trends. They are the same underlying correction, working its way through two different layers of the capital stack at once. Both are responses to the same structural flaw: that traditional venture mechanics, whether at the fund level or the company level, tie liquidity to an artificial calendar rather than to genuine readiness, and in reality, both point toward the same longer term outcome for founders, more optionality, less forced dilution, and a materially reduced need to hand board seats and preferred terms to whoever is willing to write the biggest cheque at the moment liquidity happens to be due. The caveat that matters None of this is proven at scale . . . . . yet. Continuation funds remain concentrated among the largest, most sophisticated GPs, and the smaller, emerging managers who back the most overlooked founders are only beginning to understand and gain access to these structures. Tokenised equity paired with PISCES trading remains, as we have said consistently, appears to be a mechanism where the implementation questions, how a tokenised register reconciles with Companies House, what custody structures satisfy both HMRC and the FCA, are still being worked out in live pilots rather than settled practice. DAOs and evergreen funds in their earliest, most experimental form largely did not survive contact with reality. What is different this time is that the current wave of structural innovation, evergreen funds built by institutional GPs, continuation vehicles backed by the largest LPs in the world, and PISCES built inside an FCA regulated sandbox, is happening inside durable, regulated infrastructure rather than outside it. What this could unlock If the fund level and company level versions of this correction continue to mature together, the longer term shift worth watching is a fast evolving venture ecosystem where liquidity stops being the 'impossible dream' and the single event that determines everything else about a company's ownership and control. That would matter most for the founders we have consistently argued are least well served by the current model, those without a warm network into the funds most willing to hold patient capital, and most exposed to being pushed into an early, dilutive exit simply because a fund's clock, not their company's readiness, said it was time. We would welcome perspectives from emerging manager platforms, LPs including the British Business Bank, and founders who have been through a continuation transaction or a PISCES adjacent liquidity event, on whether this connection holds up in practice. Key Takeaways Global GP led secondary volume hit a record 226 billion dollars in 2025, with continuation funds now representing about 75 per cent of that activity. Continuation and evergreen structures let GPs hold winning positions longer, reducing pressure to force premature exits on founders. The same structural insight, that fixed calendar liquidity is inefficient and founder hostile, underpins both fund level continuation vehicles and company level tokenised, PISCES enabled equity. Emerging manager platforms and LPs such as the British Business Bank are increasingly backing GPs experimenting with these more flexible structures. The shift is still concentrated among the largest, most sophisticated players, and its extension to emerging managers and smaller founders remains an open, developing question.

Most of the debate about who gets funded starts and ends with the initial cheque: who wins the pitch, whose warm introduction lands, which fund says yes.


It is the right place to start, but it stops the story too early. A less visible structural shift is taking place further up the capital stack, in how venture funds themselves are designed. It may ultimately matter just as much to founders as anything negotiated in a term sheet.


The problem, briefly, in data


Global secondary deal volume for private assets hit a record 226 billion dollars in 2025, up 41 per cent on the previous year, with nearly half of that volume coming from general partner led transactions rather than ordinary LP to LP trades.


Continuation funds, where a GP moves one or more prized assets out of an ageing fund into a new vehicle so it can keep managing them for another three to seven years, now account for roughly 75 per cent of all GP led secondary volume.


Close to three quarters of the largest global private equity firms have executed at least one continuation transaction, and evergreen and rolling fund structures, these are vehicles with no fixed end date designed to hold and compound capital indefinitely, are proliferating as wealth and even retail adjacent capital looks for access to venture style returns without a ten year lock up.


That is the starting point. Traditional ten year venture funds increasingly look less like an immutable feature of venture capital and more like a structural constraint sophisticated GPs are actively redesigning.


What's actually changing, and why it matters


The balanced, evidence led case is not that continuation funds and evergreen vehicles are a cure all. They are, at bottom, a liquidity mechanism, a way for a fund's own backers to get cash out of ageing positions without forcing a premature sale of the underlying company.


But that liquidity mechanism has a direct, underappreciated effect on founders, because a fund under less pressure to force an exit on a fixed timetable is a fund that can support a founder through a longer, less rushed path to scale.


For decades, venture capital has optimised around fund economics as much as founder outcomes. Evergreen and continuation structures do not solve every problem, but they represent a genuine attempt to align the two more closely.


A GP willing to hold a winning position for fifteen years rather than force a sale in year eight is, in practice, a GP better aligned with the founder sitting across the table from them and the emerging manager platforms and LP mandates that increasingly favour this flexibility, including institutional LPs such as the British Business Bank, which has repeatedly signalled support for first time and structurally innovative fund managers through its emerging manager commitments, are part of the same story: capital that is willing to back new structures, not just new founders.


Where this connects to the founder capital thesis


It appears that almost all of the commentary on continuation funds and evergreen structures treats them as a private equity back office story, a way for GPs and LPs to manage portfolio liquidity among themselves. Very little of it asks what this pattern implies for founders directly and we think it implies quite a lot.


The same structural insight reshaping fund liquidity, that locking capital up for a fixed decade regardless of a company's readiness is often inefficient and founder-hostile, also sits beneath our long-held thesis on tokenised equity, secondary trading windows and PISCES.


A founder building on a tokenised share register, with access to PISCES style trading windows for their own company's shares, is addressing the same structural problem at the company level that continuation funds are solving at the fund level: how do you give early backers, employees and investors a realistic route to liquidity without forcing a full, premature exit event that hands control to whoever is buying.


Seen this way, evergreen funds, continuation vehicles and tokenised, PISCES enabled equity are not separate trends but the same underlying correction, working its way through two different layers of the capital stack at once.


Both are responses to the same structural flaw: that traditional venture mechanics, whether at the fund level or the company level, tie liquidity to an artificial calendar rather than to genuine readiness, and in reality, both point toward the same longer term outcome for founders, more optionality, less forced dilution, and a materially reduced need to hand board seats and preferred terms to whoever is willing to write the biggest cheque at the moment liquidity happens to be due.


The important point is that these developments are emerging independently. Evergreen funds are not being created because tokenisation exists, and tokenised equity is not being built to support continuation funds. Yet both arrive at remarkably similar conclusions: capital works better when liquidity is decoupled from arbitrary time limits.


When two different parts of the market solve the same problem in the same way, it is often a sign that the underlying problem is real.


The caveat that matters


None of this is proven at scale . . . . . yet. Continuation funds remain concentrated among the largest, most sophisticated GPs, and the smaller, emerging managers who back the most overlooked founders are only beginning to understand and gain access to these structures.


As we have consistently argued, tokenised equity paired with PISCES trading remains a promising mechanism rather than settled practice. The implementation questions, from reconciling tokenised share registers with Companies House to satisfying HMRC and FCA requirements around custody, are still being worked through in live pilots.


DAOs and evergreen funds in their earliest, most experimental form largely did not survive contact with reality. What is different this time is that the current wave of structural innovation, evergreen funds built by institutional GPs, continuation vehicles backed by the largest LPs in the world, and PISCES built inside an FCA regulated sandbox, is happening inside durable, regulated infrastructure rather than outside it.


What this could unlock


The deeper pattern is that liquidity is gradually becoming infrastructure rather than an event. Instead of waiting for a single IPO or acquisition to release value, venture capital is beginning to build mechanisms that allow liquidity throughout a company's life, when circumstances justify it rather than when a fund's timetable demands it.


If the fund level and company level versions of this shift continue to mature together, venture could evolve into a system where liquidity is no longer the single event that determines ownership, control and founder outcomes. That would matter most for the founders least well served by today's model: those without access to the most patient capital, and those too often pushed towards premature, dilutive exits simply because a fund's clock, rather than their company's readiness, said it was time.


Whether or not tokenised equity becomes mainstream, one conclusion already feels difficult to ignore. Venture capital itself is beginning to reject the idea that liquidity should be dictated by the calendar. If that shift continues, founders may ultimately gain something more valuable than faster exits: the freedom to choose when they are actually ready.


Key Takeaways


  • Global GP led secondary volume hit a record 226 billion dollars in 2025, with continuation funds now representing about 75 per cent of that activity.

  • Continuation and evergreen structures let GPs hold winning positions longer, reducing pressure to force premature exits on founders.

  • The same structural insight, that fixed calendar liquidity is inefficient and founder hostile, underpins both fund level continuation vehicles and company level tokenised, PISCES enabled equity.

  • Emerging manager platforms and LPs such as the British Business Bank are increasingly backing GPs experimenting with these more flexible structures.

  • The shift is still concentrated among the largest, most sophisticated players, and its extension to emerging managers and smaller founders remains an open, developing question.


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