When Wayve Technologies uncrossed an $85m share auction on the London Stock Exchange’s Private Securities Market on 8 July, it handed the UK’s newest trading venue its marquee moment. A British artificial-intelligence company valued at about $8.6bn had used PISCES, the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System, to let staff cash in vested equity without an initial public offering. It was the largest trade the regime has seen, and the clearest proof yet that PISCES is no longer a slide in a Treasury deck but a venue where real money moves.
It was also a study in what PISCES is, and what it is not. The shares changed hands at roughly a 10 per cent discount to Wayve’s most recent private valuation, and went to a small group of institutional buyers led by ARK Invest, Liberty Street, G Squared and Launchbay Capital. Stifel ran the placement and Crowdcube managed the sale. The auction gave employees an exit. What it did not obviously produce was the kind of price discovery a public listing forces on a company.
Four months into live trading, that tension defines the market. The open question is no longer whether PISCES will launch. It is whether the regime becomes a genuine pre-IPO market or settles into a narrow instrument for a handful of large names.
From rulebook to trades
PISCES began life as a sandbox. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 (PISCES Sandbox) Regulations 2025 created a bespoke, time-limited regime, running until 2030, that lets private companies arrange intermittent, scheduled windows in which existing shares can trade without the company going public. The FCA supervises the operators. Issuers, not a continuous order book, decide when a window opens.
The first trades followed quickly. In March 2026, JP Jenkins ran the debut PISCES auction, for QPlay, a British board-game maker behind the Amazon best-seller Outsmarted!. Its order window ran from 18 to 24 March and uncrossed on the afternoon of the 24th, with Peel Hunt and Winterflood among the approved intermediaries. Days later, on 25 March, the London Stock Exchange’s Private Securities Market opened its own first auction, built around Oxford Science Enterprises, a venture portfolio valued at about £1.3bn, through a structure designed for the platform by Tradeable Private Equity.
One distinction is worth keeping straight, because it is easy to overstate what these trades achieve. PISCES is a secondary market. It moves existing shares between holders; it is not a fundraising venue. QPlay did raise fresh money on Crowdcube at around the same time, but that was separate crowdfunding, not a PISCES primary raise. The regime’s core purpose is periodic liquidity for employees and early backers, not new capital for the company.
More venues than trades
On the supply side, the market has expanded fast. The London Stock Exchange received the first PISCES Approval Notice in August 2025. JP Jenkins was approved late in 2025. Asset Match followed on 21 April 2026, and Vestd, which lets companies run a venue without an intermediary, was cleared at the end of April. The UK now has four routes to regulated secondary trading in private shares, where a year ago it had none.
That is the striking asymmetry. Four operators are approved, but only a handful of auctions have actually run. Capacity is being built faster than volume is arriving. And the names that have traded skew to the extremes: a small consumer company at the retail-facing end, a large venture portfolio wrapped in a bespoke structure, and one AI unicorn running an employee tender. It is a thin sample from which to declare a new asset class.
The tax and disclosure scaffolding
The plumbing, though, is real. The Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System (Exemption from Stamp Duties) Regulations 2025 exempt PISCES transfers from stamp duty and stamp duty reserve tax, a change trailed in the Autumn 2024 Budget and in force from 3 July 2025. Like the regime itself, the relief is tied to the life of the sandbox, so it expires unless the rules are made permanent.
Disclosure is deliberately lighter than on a public market. PISCES runs a bespoke regime in which the issuer controls what information is released, and to whom, with the market-abuse rules that govern listed shares modified for the private setting. That is the trade-off at the heart of the design: less public scrutiny in exchange for periodic liquidity. It is also the feature that will decide how comfortable large institutions become buying in size, and at what price.
What the Wayve trade signals
This is where the sceptical read has teeth. Wayve is the best test case yet, and it cleared. But it cleared at a discount, to a short list of professional buyers, in a window arranged to give staff an exit. Some observers argued the trade could mean fewer London listings, not more, if founders conclude they can hand employees liquidity without ever facing the discipline of a public market. If the marquee name on the platform priced below its last round and drew a narrow buyer base, the claim that PISCES is a broad, price-setting market looks premature.
None of this makes PISCES a failure. An intermittent, disclosure-gated venue that gives employees and early investors periodic exits is a useful thing, and it did not exist in Britain before this year. The regime moved from consultation to live trades in months, which is fast by any regulatory standard, and the demand for liquidity it is meeting is genuine.
The verdict that matters is still pending, and it belongs to the Treasury. Ministers must decide whether to write the sandbox into permanent law before the 2030 deadline. On the evidence of the first four months, they are being asked to make permanent a market that has proved it can deliver liquidity, but has not yet proved it can discover a price. Whether more issuers follow Wayve, and at what valuations, will decide which of those PISCES turns out to be.
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