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.

Family offices are moving earlier into venture but wait 15 to 16 years for cash. Startups are the stage where secondary liquidity can be designed in from the start.

Tokenised startup equity combined with PISCES, whose FCA rules were published on 10 June 2025, could give family offices a controlled way to sell part of a stake before a company is sold or listed. SEIS holding rules still set the pace.

Ondo Finance launched Ondo Private Markets on 6 October 2026, tokenised notes that track private company share values at liquidity events but carry no ownership rights.

British Business Bank research published on 29 September 2026 finds UK venture capital funds returning as much as US funds overall, and more among recent funds. The catch is that much of the recent gain has not yet been paid out in cash.

ARK has put an existing closed-end fund onchain without changing the terms on which investors can get their money out. For anyone weighing a tokenised fund structure, the repurchase rules matter more than the blockchain.

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.

Institutions that already hold a US share can now hand it over and receive Ondo's token for it, or return the token and get the share back, without any cash changing hands. The ability to redeem a token for the real share is what keeps the token's price close to the share's, which makes this a question every builder of tokenised equity has to answer.

A profitable digital asset exchange putting its own shares onto a blockchain is a small operational milestone dressed up as a big signal, and this week Bullish gave UK founders watching the tokenised equity space a live example of what eating your own cooking looks like at listed company scale.

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 f

Private company shareholders in the UK have a new, concrete answer to the question of when they can actually sell, and the first company to test it is not a startup at all, which is exactly why founders should pay attention.

The model widened who could invest. The next one has to fix what it left unsolved: liquidity, selection, and the cost of staying in.

Midas and Symbiotic have built an RFQ-based liquidity layer with up to 40 million dollars of capacity, letting investors redeem tokenised assets instantly on chain.