If These 3 Big IPOs Happen, No One Else May Have a Shot |
If These 3 Big IPOs Happen, No One Else May Have a Shot
A trio of mega-exits could suck up all the air in the room, even as they also broke records for venture capital-backed tech IPOs.
BY BRIAN CONTRERAS, STAFF WRITER @_B_CONTRERAS_
Illustration: Inc; Photo: Anthropic, Getty Images, OpenAI
With IPOs rebounding over the last year, companies looking to exit via the public market may be thinking 2026 could be their chance to pull the trigger. After all, if the likes of Figma, Klarna, and CoreWeave could do it—not to mention a long list of crypto firms—why not others?
A new report from market research firm PitchBook suggests that IPO hopefuls may be stymied, however, by what on its surface looks like a good thing: the looming prospect of three mega-offerings this year, in the form of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic.
The trio of tech ventures—Elon Musk’s rocket company plus the AI giants behind ChatGPT and Claude, respectively—have all grown to massive scale while remaining privately held, but rumors are now swirling that all three could IPO sometime this year.
It could be a good sign for the IPO market writ large, but an obstacle for any smaller company that wants to go public this year, too. Worth an estimated $2.42 trillion in total by PitchBook’s count, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic would each individually set the record for the largest-ever VC-backed American tech IPO, the research firm reports, and would together yield a total exit value higher than every VC-backed American IPO since 2000. They’d also stretch the capacity of underwriters and hoover up a lot of public market capital for themselves, PitchBook warns, while also restricting investor distributions to a relatively small subset of lucky shareholders.
How Anthropic's Claude AI Became a Co-Founder
A post-listing dip, meanwhile, could slam the IPO window shut for other hopefuls until deep into next year, the analysts claim.
“These mega IPOs of 2026 could be the tide that lifts all boats—or the wave that capsizes the market,” PitchBook wrote in a Thursday blog post on the subject.
Those concerns are compounded with other market headwinds, such as those that reportedly prompted the crypto exchange giant Kraken to put its own IPO plans on indefinite hold earlier this week. (First reported on by the crypto outlet CoinDesk, Reuters could not independently verify this development.)