Pisces' First Listing: A Board Game Company, Not a Tech Giant

A board game company with fewer than 10 employees is set to become the first listing on the UK's highly touted Pisces private market framework, narrowly beating the London Stock Exchange's inaugural candidate by just seven days. Qplay, the firm behind Outsmarted board games, will list on JP Jenkins' Pisces platform on 18 March, whilst the LSE's debut listing—an investment vehicle linked to Oxford Science Enterprises—follows on 25 March. The government had hoped Pisces would mark a new chapter for London's capital markets, providing private companies with a regulated pathway to attract investors whilst potentially serving as a stepping stone towards full public listings.

Instead, the framework's launch has devolved into a contest between rival trading venues scrambling to claim bragging rights for the first listing, regardless of the company's actual profile or growth trajectory.

The billion-pound firms that said no thanks

What makes this debut particularly telling is not who's joining Pisces, but who declined the invitation. According to sources familiar with the matter, the London Stock Exchange Group directly approached high-profile UK tech firms including Revolut and Octopus about becoming early Pisces constituents. The response amounted to polite disinterest—a damning verdict from precisely the type of companies the framework was designed to attract.

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Qplay reportedly generated profits of roughly £500,000. That's not a criticism of the company itself, which presumably runs a perfectly respectable business selling board games. But as a flagship example of what Pisces can deliver, the contrast with the government's original vision is striking.

The entire premise of the framework emerged from concerns that Britain was losing high-growth technology firms to American exchanges—companies worth hundreds of millions or billions that chose New York over London for their public market debuts.

Nothing about a small board game manufacturer suggests those structural issues have been addressed. If anything, the reality of this first listing underscores how far removed Pisces remains from the problem it was meant to solve.

When competitive dynamics trump strategic value

The race between JP Jenkins and LSEG to secure the first Pisces listing reveals another uncomfortable truth about the framework's launch. Both operators appear more focused on the symbolic value of being first than on whether their inaugural companies actually demonstrate the market's potential. JP Jenkins managed to edge ahead by a single week—hardly the stuff of historic financial innovation.

This isn't entirely surprising. First-mover advantage matters enormously in financial markets, particularly when establishing new trading venues. The prestige of hosting the inaugural listing carries weight with future prospects. But that logic assumes subsequent companies will follow, creating network effects that justify the initial rush.

What happens when those subsequent companies don't materialise? The suggestion that larger firms are merely "biding their time" before joining Pisces feels optimistic at best. Major private companies typically avoid untested markets precisely because they can afford to wait—or more likely, because they have better alternatives already available.

Firms valued in the billions don't need Pisces to access capital. They have private equity, venture debt, secondary markets, and the option of a traditional IPO if they actually want public investors.

The structural challenges no one's addressing

The fundamental tension here is that Pisces was designed to solve two different problems simultaneously: democratising access to private company shares for retail investors, and creating a more attractive pathway for firms to eventually go public. These objectives aren't necessarily compatible.

Sophisticated private companies often remain private specifically to avoid the disclosure requirements, quarterly earnings pressures, and regulatory overhead that come with public market access.

Pisces offers a halfway house, but it's unclear why a fast-growing fintech or biotech firm would want to occupy that space when remaining fully private has worked perfectly well.

Meanwhile, retail investors—the "democratisation" beneficiaries—face genuine risks when buying shares in private companies without the protections and liquidity of established public markets. The companies most likely to list on Pisces may well be those that couldn't secure traditional funding or didn't meet the requirements for a standard LSE listing. That creates an adverse selection problem that no amount of regulatory framework can easily overcome.

The government's expectations for 2025 Pisces listings haven't exactly been met with enthusiasm. Both inaugural listings will technically occur before year-end, but the tepid response from Britain's most valuable private firms suggests deeper scepticism about the model itself. Unless Pisces can attract at least one genuinely significant company in the coming months—the kind of name that makes institutional investors take notice—the framework risks becoming a footnote rather than the transformative development its architects envisioned. The next six months will determine whether this is a slow start or simply a non-starter.

More articles by Ross Williams