Founders, staff and early investors in UK startups now have more ways to sell shares before an exit. This guide compares private sales, company buybacks, tender offers, crowdfunding secondary markets, PISCES and tokenised shares.

A 2026 RBC and Campden Wealth survey found that 47 per cent of attempted fund exits stalled. This Open Question asks what that means for family offices as patient capital, and for UK founders raising from them.

Sequoia Capital's scout programme, credited with helping the US firm source early stakes in companies including Stripe, has built out a network of scouts across Europe, according to reporting by Sifted published on 11 September. Scouts typically operate with a small allocated pot of between $100,000

Carlos Domingo, co-founder and chief executive of Securitize, has a blunt pitch for public companies: you probably do not know who owns your own stock, and blockchain can fix that. He is using his own company's shares to make the case.

UK investors have so far only been able to watch tokenised stock trading develop in the US from the sidelines. That is about to change.

For a scaling UK company whose staff and early investors are sitting on vested shares, the historic answer to when can I actually sell has too often been simple: nowhere, until an IPO or an acquisition years down the line arrives, if it ever does. Monzo is the example founders point to most often, a

Ondo Finance activated round the clock minting and redemption for ten additional tokenised US stocks on 17 July, including AMD and Intel, taking the total number of always available assets on its platform to 16. The move makes Ondo the first tokenisation platform to offer genuine round the clock pri

For UK founders weighing how to reward long serving staff without forcing a sale or an IPO, Moneybox has just supplied a fresh data point, and a useful one, because it is the first British fintech to put real numbers behind the answer.

Picture two founders, both running businesses that make money and make a difference. One has built a climate hardware company and can issue shares like any other startup. The other runs a care provider structured as a Community Interest Company, with an asset lock and a dividend cap baked into its c

A plain English guide for founders and investors. Part of our intelligence series on equity tokenisation in the UK.

A founder in Britain in 2026 can do almost everything right and still end up in someone else's market. She can spin tech out of a UK university, raise a seed round from UK angels, hire her first team in Leeds or Bristol or Oxford, and prove that the thing works. She can scale the business to unprecedented heights, well almost, and then! At the precise moment the company is ready to grow into something durable, she will find that the money to do that is not here. It is in

Picture a founder outside the story everyone is telling. She is not building a large language model. She is building a climate hardware business in Sheffield, or a healthtech tool in Cardiff, with early revenue and a plan to grow. This week the British Business Bank published the numbers that descri

Equity crowdfunding made a simple promise: ordinary people could back a young company early, alongside the founders, and share in what it became. Monzo is the poster child. One early round filled in 96 seconds. In December 2018 the bank raised about £20m from roughly 36,000 people. Buying in was effortless, a few taps in an app. Getting out is the part nobody designed for. Most crowd investors do not sit directly on a company's share register. They invest through a nomi

For years the frustration voiced by British founders and the people who build alongside them has been the same. You can grow a company worth billions in London and still find that nobody who helped create that value can realise any of it, short of selling to an overseas buyer or waiting out an IPO t

A dental technology company has put its shares on Solana through a Regulation S offering, and the UK adviser on the deal hints at where private capital formation is heading.

London Tech Week in review. 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 pr

A research note published this week by Binance Research puts a number on something the tokenisation sector has been circling for two years. It argues that crypto exchanges could route around US$2 trillion of new capital and close to 300 million new investors into global equity markets by 2031, with

For the second time in three years, London has claimed the top position in Europe's technology ecosystem rankings. Dealroom's Global Tech Ecosystem Index 2026 has placed London ahead of Paris and every other European hub, ranking the UK capital fourth globally behind the Bay Area, New York and Bosto

In a courtroom in London, a judge has determined that a startup founder's claims against five of his former investors carry a real prospect of success. It is a procedural ruling, not a final verdict. But for founders who have faced pressure from their backers, the Cognism case is already one of the

The numbers are in for Q1 2026, and the headline story is straightforward: UK equity investment is holding steady at roughly £6 billion per quarter, the UK remains Europe's dominant destination for venture capital, and the market is, on the surface, healthy.