Every week this publication covers another piece of UK market infrastructure edging tokenisation from pilot toward permanence, a sandbox settlement, a feedback statement, a new PISCES admission. Almost none of it touches the part of the UK's startup finance system that most badly needs a liquidity answer: the earliest, smallest, highest risk shareholdings created under the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme. SEIS is the most generous tax incentive available to any investor

Tokenised equity is moving from experiment to infrastructure Tokenised equity is moving from experiment to infrastructure Tokenisation is no longer limited to conference demonstrations. Banks, asset managers, exchanges and regulators are now putting live products and settlement systems into production. Currently, the most activity today concerns tokenised funds, bonds, deposits and private-market assets, not ordinary public-company shares trading freely on a blockchain. Tok

Crowdcube says £543 million of secondary share sales are in its PISCES pipeline, a figure it says could reach £750 million across 29 listings.

More UK companies raised equity for the first time outside London than inside it in the first half of 2026, according to Beauhurst research.

Veremark has opened a £6 million share sale on the London Stock Exchange's Private Securities Market, letting staff and early backers sell vested shares.

The East of England has plenty of ideas. What it has lacked, compared with its output, is its fair share of investment. On 23 September 2026, the British Business Bank launched the East of England Investment Fund, a £140 million fund for small and medium-sized businesses across Essex, Suffolk, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. The fund will provide loans of between £25,000 and £2 million, alongside equity investments of up to £5 million. The launch matters beca

A year on, PISCES has hosted at least six auctions across five companies on four approved venues, thinner on volume than hoped but wider than it looks.

AMC Entertainment chief executive Adam Aron has demanded that Robinhood immediately stop issuing tokens tracking AMC's share price, escalating a public dispute that puts a sharp UK relevant question on the table: what happens to tokenised equity when the underlying issuer never agreed to it.

While public software stocks have taken a beating and social feeds have spent six weeks declaring a SaaSpocalypse, one UK seed investor's own portfolio numbers tell a calmer story about what is actually happening inside early stage software companies.

For founders building outside London, the message from the Treasury this week was explicit: growth capital is being redirected toward the regions, not just topped up in the capital.

Pre-seed founders outside the AI hype cycle are having a harder time raising than the headline numbers suggest. The British Business Bank's Small Business Equity Tracker 2026, published in July, found that UK equity investment into smaller businesses fell 4 per cent to 12.3 billion pounds in 2025, w

Asset manager Bitwise has launched a set of automated portfolios built on Coinbase's tokenised US stocks, letting eligible non-US investors follow preset investment strategies while keeping their tokens in their own wallets rather than handing custody to a fund manager.

M&G Investments and Schroders are among the asset managers bidding to run Britain's proposed £1 billion Scale Up Fund, Sky News reported on Wednesday, as the consortium of pension providers behind the vehicle moves from announcement to execution. A number of other firms, including specialist early s

Over 230 founders, 17 roundtables, 11 cities, all four nations of the UK. Earlier this year Startup Coalition ran the kind of listening tour that policymakers usually only manage in an election year, sitting down with founders from Belfast to Cardiff and Aberdeen to Leeds to hear, unfiltered, what i

The headline number in Beauhurst and NatWest's latest New Startup Index looks like bad news at first glance. New company incorporations fell 5.7 per cent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year, with 402,000 businesses registered at Companies House. Read only that far and t

Oshen, a Plymouth based ocean robotics company spun out of Imperial College London, has raised just under £3.7 million (around 5 million dollars) in a funding round led by Lunar Ventures, with participation from AlbionVC, Twin Track, Concept Ventures and a number of angel investors. The company was

HexSeed Technology, a deeptech startup based in Banchory near Aberdeen, has raised more than £600,000 in early stage funding led by Carbon13, with participation from the Net Zero Technology Centre and Vento Ventures, backers confirmed this week. The round was written through Carbon13's SEIS Fund IX,

For a deeptech or life sciences founder in Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester or Sheffield, the hardest part of scaling has rarely been the science. It has been getting a cheque of meaningful size from an investor who understands the sector and is prepared to back a second or third round without demanding

QuantumLight, the venture firm founded by Revolut chief executive Nik Storonsky, has closed 500 million dollars for its second fund, doubling the size of the 250 million dollar debut vehicle it closed just over a year ago. Sifted reported the close on 18 August, citing people familiar with the deal.

US based venture firm Accel has raised 800 million dollars for its ninth early stage Europe and Israel fund, alongside a further 2.7 billion dollars across three other funds, the firm confirmed on 12 August.