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.

Six months after a poll of UK founders and investors on equity tokenisation, the plumbing has arrived but the case studies have not. Who is ready, who should wait, and what comes next.

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.

FCA director Jon Relleen told a capital markets summit on 5 October that PISCES has four authorised operators and seven transactions, that the DIGIT digital gilt is due early next year, and that a joint tokenisation roadmap is coming in the next few weeks.

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.

It has been a fast few weeks for anyone trying to keep up with UK tokenised equity, SEIS reform talk and the early life of PISCES. Today's brief is a lighter one on breaking news, so it felt like the right moment for a pause and a quiz rather than another headline. Ten questions on where things actu

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

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.

Standfirst: A year after PISCES launched and weeks after Tokenising Startups first mapped the reconciliation between tokenised shares and Companies House, this is a practical stocktake of what a founder or SEIS investor can actually use today, as distinct from what is still a pilot, a plan, or an op

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.

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

Over the past year at TokenisingStartups, we have watched tokenisation move from something that could still be dismissed as an interesting experiment into an increasingly serious part of the financial infrastructure conversation. Banks are issuing tokenised bonds and exploring tokenised deposits. Asset managers are putting funds on-chain. Exchanges are developing tokenised securities infrastructure. Regulators are creating new frameworks for digital assets. And in the UK, PIS

Three operators are now live, a handful of household name private companies have run their first trading events, and the regulatory sandbox has five years left to run. On paper, PISCES looks like a UK reform that is working. Look at what the lawyers advising the companies actually running these even

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.

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.

For anyone building in tokenisation in Britain, the hard question has never been whether the technology works. It is whether the UK will be a place worth building it in. A new report from UK Finance, the industry body for the country's banking and finance sector, offers an uncomfortable but useful a

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

On 30 June, something quietly ends for anyone who owns shares in a private British company. Until that date, trading those shares on the London Stock Exchange's Private Securities Market, the venue built under the UK's new PISCES regime, costs nothing in transaction fees. From 1 July, the first real

The first big test of tokenised equity exposed the gap between onchain demand and the real shares behind it.

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