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Employees at Wayve, the British autonomous driving firm, began selling $85 million of their shares today in the first employee share sale ever conducted on the London Stock Exchange’s Private Securities Market, a moment with real consequences for every UK founder who has ever promised staff their options would one day be worth something.
Crowdcube managed the sell-side of the transaction, which is not only a first for the PSM but also the largest deal completed under the FCA’s PISCES regulation, the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System, since the framework went live.
The PSM is designed to provide liquidity in some of the world’s leading later-stage private companies, while helping current employees with vested equity to unlock some of the value they have helped to create. In plain terms, staff at private firms can now sell a slice of their holdings through a regulated exchange without waiting for a float or a trade sale.
That matters well beyond Cambridge and the robotaxi race. Share options have long been the growing firm’s answer to corporate salaries it cannot match, but the promise has always carried an asterisk: the money is theoretical until an exit arrives, and exits have been thin on the ground. A functioning secondary market changes the conversation an SME founder can have with a prospective hire.
Dame Julia Hoggett, CEO of London Stock Exchange plc, said: “We are delighted to see the PISCES framework and our Private Securities Market being utilised by innovative companies, such as Wayve, seeking liquidity events for their stakeholders, including employees.”
Wayve is arguably the ideal poster child. The company closed a $1.5 billion funding round valuing it at $8.6 billion earlier this year, the highest valuation yet achieved by a UK AI start-up, and in May signed a formal partnership with the government to accelerate self-driving deployment on British roads. Its staff have built substantial paper wealth. Today, some of it becomes actual wealth, in London rather than New York.
Matt Cooper, Crowdcube co-CEO, said: “This is what we hope will be the first of many of these transactions with other partners for Crowdcube – using our leading infrastructure to manage a complex employee liquidity transaction on the London Stock Exchange’s Private Securities Market – as we’ve done for Wayve in this instance.
“As Europe’s leading private market liquidity platform, Crowdcube’s is seeing a massive increase in the number of companies looking to complete secondary share sales in the next 6-12 months.
“These are transactions for a wide variety of companies, providing liquidity for employees and early stage investors that Crowdcube can support, including through the Private Securities Market.”
That pipeline comment deserves attention. With UK start-ups enjoying a record fundraising first half but staying private for longer, pressure for liquidity from employees and early backers has been building for years. If Cooper is right, Wayve’s tender is the start of a queue, and businesses far smaller than an $8.6 billion AI champion will be watching how the mechanics perform.
The $85 million employee tender was supported by Registered Auction Agents Stifel, acting as sole and exclusive private placement agent, alongside advisors Latham & Watkins and Deloitte.
For UK capital markets, bruised by years of headlines about departing listings, this is a rarer story: new infrastructure, built in London, being used at scale on day one. For business owners, the lesson is simpler still. Equity you give your team may soon be worth something before you sell up, and that changes how you hire.
