Wayve and Moneybox have completed employee share sales on London’s new private market, while Veremark has announced plans for one. The prices tell one story, and the list of people allowed to sell tells another.
If you have spent six years inside a London startup watching your options grow on a spreadsheet and nowhere else, these may have been some strange months to read the business pages.
For many startup employees, turning shares into cash would usually mean waiting for an acquisition, a stock market listing or a company-arranged secondary sale. Now, scheduled trading windows are creating another route for existing shareholders to sell.
The startup secondaries market UK employees were long told to wait for has, for a handful of companies, finally opened a door.
It has opened well, unevenly, one might say.
Moneybox’s staff sold at a price roughly 45% above the company’s valuation of two years earlier, while Wayve’s staff sold at a reported discount to the company’s latest funding round, and both sales ran on the same venue within weeks of each other.
What does a share sale mean on a market where nobody can quite agree what a share is worth, and who exactly gets invited to take part?
We think the answers reveal more about the startup secondaries market UK founders and employees now face than any headline valuation does.
A Window Called PISCES
The mechanism behind most of these sales has an unwieldy name, the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System, which everyone shortens to PISCES.
It is a government and FCA framework that lets an authorised operator run scheduled trading windows for existing shares in private companies so that shareholders can sell without the company listing or being acquired.
The London Stock Exchange’s Private Securities Market (PSM) became the first operator to receive FCA approval in August 2025, inside a sandbox that runs until June 2030. Only existing shares can be sold, no new shares are issued, and transfers carry a stamp duty exemption that removes the 0.5% charge a buyer would normally bear.
The first trades were quite modest.
QPlay became the first company to trade under PISCES when its auction opened in March 2026. Later that month, a vehicle holding shares in Oxford Science Enterprises, valued at £1.3bn, produced the first transaction on the London Stock Exchange’s Private Securities Market (PSM).
The one that changed the conversation arrived in July, when Wayve ran an $85m sale for employees, the largest PISCES trade so far, then soon, Moneybox followed, and in early October, Veremark announced plans for an approximately a £6m sale involving employees and early investors.
The exchange described it as the third employee share sale on its market.
PISCES private company shares now make up the newest layer of the startup secondaries market UK companies can use, sitting alongside older routes such as company-run tender offers and one-off sales to investors.
Is that the start of a pipeline or a run of coincidences? The platform that manages many of these sales puts its queue at £543m, although that is its own estimate, and it has acknowledged the early pace of PISCES trading UK has been slower than hoped.
Two Sales, Two Prices
Moneybox sold at roughly £800m, about 45% above the £550m valuation it carried in October 2024, in a fixed-price sale where the company controlled who could take part and no new capital was raised.
Wayve’s shares reportedly went at around a 10% discount to the valuation of its Series D, which was in the region of $8.6bn, and the buyers acquired common stock without the liquidation preferences that attach to preferred shares.
That last detail matters more than it actually sounds, because the preferred shares carry protections that common shares, the kind employees usually hold, do not, so a discount on common stock can sit alongside a headline valuation that never moves.
What we find hard to resolve is the price discovery problem.
Now, a window gives a company a moment where buyers and sellers meet, but the price is negotiated and the company decides who participates, which means a single result can look like a verdict on the business when it may only reflect the structure of the sale.
If you are an employee deciding whether to sell, which number should you trust: the last funding round, the last window, or neither? And if you are an investor reading one of these prices, what exactly are you being told?
The Founder’s Version
Founder-led secondary deals in the UK rose from 650 in 2015 to nearly 1,800 in 2022 on one widely cited count, a period in which nearly 8,000 startups exited, close to 40% of them in the last two and a half years.
We do not know yet, how that category divides between founders selling and other shareholders selling, nor how the numbers have moved since 2022, and the gap matters because it is the clearest public data we found on the founder side.
In practice, how founders sell shares before exit, UK investors will tolerate is settled long before any sale, in the paperwork. A shareholders’ agreement from an earlier round often restricts transfers, while pre-emption rights and a right of first refusal give existing investors first claim on anything offered, so a founder who wants to sell usually has to offer the shares to the people already on the register.
Some platforms advise founders to negotiate secondary-sale permissions in advance, potentially allowing them to sell a limited portion of their holdings without seeking fresh consent each time, but whether that is possible depends on the shareholder agreement, transfer restrictions and any agreed exceptions.
Founders sell shares before exit, UK investors permit mostly in modest portions, and each sale redraws the cap table in ways that later investors will notice.
Do investors treat that flexibility as a fair price for backing a founder through a long wait, or as an early signal about how the founder feels about the company’s future?
The Employee Question
For employees, the mechanics look different.
A tender offer startup employees are invited into is a company-sponsored sale at a set price per share, usually with eligibility rules such as a vesting cut-off date and a cap on how much each person can sell, and the buyer is typically a late-stage investor, a secondary fund or the company itself. Only vested shares can be sold, and any restrictions on them have to be released first, which may mean changing the terms of the share plan.
Who is allowed in is the part we would watch most closely.
Monzo’s 2024 sale at a $5.9bn valuation was reportedly open to current staff only, with a cap of up to 40% of holdings, and more than 50 former employees petitioned the board to be included.
Revolut offered its staff a sale for the fifth time in November 2025 at $75bn, and a new process at a reported $115bn was confirmed in July, although we could not confirm that it has been completed.
Behind every one of those decisions sits an employee liquidity startup boards have to answer: how much to let people sell, whose shares to buy first, and how to avoid signalling that insiders want out.
Two companies can run the same tender offer, and startup employees can see it on paper and get opposite messages.
Which message do the staff hear?
Read next: Share Option Pool: How UK Startups Size & Structure It
What It Costs to Cash Out
Tax can usually decide whether a sale is worth doing at all, and the UK startup secondary market sellers' entrance is shaped as much by tax as by price.
Capital gains tax on selling startup shares depends on who is selling and how they came to hold those shares.
Gains are taxed at 18% or 24% with a £3,000 annual exempt amount, and founders who qualify can use business asset disposal relief, which rose to 18% on 6 April 2026 and is limited to £1m of lifetime gains. Employees holding options outside a tax-advantaged scheme can face income tax and national insurance on exercise rather than a capital gain, which is a very different bill.
PISCES adds its own wrinkle.
HMRC has said that shares become readily convertible assets while a trading window is open or anticipated, which brings PAYE obligations into play, and the government has said companies will be able to update EMI options and CSOP awards so employees can exercise at a window without losing their tax advantages.
The detail of timing and order matters, and one founder-focused guide warns that getting it wrong can put an entire EMI scheme at risk, which is why we would hand the specifics to an adviser and not to a blog post.
Rates and reliefs here are those in force at the time of writing, and the Autumn Budget on 28th October could definitely change them.
Who Is Not in the Room
Global secondaries volume has reached somewhere between $118bn and $121bn in the first half of 2026, but almost all of it is private equity.
Venture secondaries held flat at roughly $5bn, about 4% of the total on our arithmetic, with pricing split between strong companies and the rest.
The buyers on a PISCES platform are limited to eligible investors: institutions, employees and consultants of the company, trustees of employee share schemes, and certified high-net-worth or sophisticated investors.
The PSM has also set entry thresholds on funds raised, assets and turnover, and companies cannot buy back their own shares during a window.
So the companies whose staff can sell are those that clear the bar, which leaves a question about the many UK startups that look nothing like Wayve. A private company UK secondary market investor can use with confidence needs depth, and a few oversubscribed deals do not yet prove it.
So is the startup secondaries market UK companies describe today really a market or a set of well-run exceptions?
What We’d Still Like To Ask
Secondary research can map the structure of this market, but it cannot tell us how a sale feels from inside the deal. These are the questions we would put to the people involved.
- To companies that have run a window: why PISCES private company shares and not a conventional tender offer, who set the price, and how did you decide who could sell?
- To founders: when founders sell shares before exit UK investors usually attach conditions, so what did yours ask for, and how much of your holding did you sell?
- To employees who sold: what did the proceeds change for you, and would you sell more in a second window?
- To buyers: how do you price common stock against preferred, and what would make you step away from a deal?
- To the FCA and Treasury: what does success look like when the sandbox closes in 2030?
If that date arrives with a handful of well-known names on the register, will that count as a market?
Editorial Note
This piece is based on secondary research, and we have not spoken to the companies named. Tax rates and rules reflect those in force on 27 October 2026, ahead of the Autumn Budget on 28 October.
If you have run a secondary sale as a founder, employee or buyer, we would really like to hear your thoughts.
Sources: Charles Russell Speechlys; Veremark; London Stock Exchange; LSEG Private Securities Market; Sifted on Veremark; Crowdfund Insider on the PISCES queue; Crowdfund Insider on Wayve; The Fintech Times on Beauhurst and Charles Stanley; Tech.eu on Revolut; Sifted on Monzo; Sifted on the Monzo petition; Evercore H1 2026 review; Investment Week; HCR Law; Slaughter and May; Taylor Wessing; Wedlake Bell; Vestd on PISCES; Vestd on secondary markets; SeedLegals; Orrick; Carta UK; PostHog; Shackleton; GOV.UK guidance on Business Asset Disposal Relief.
