Stuck at the Starting Line: The 2026 IPO Market Stall

A volatile earnings week. It was another week of ups and downs for the public markets with some big moves on earnings results. Companies like Vertiv, SK Hynix and Chipotle performed well after earnings, but ServiceNow, Intel, Boeing, Alphabet, Caterpillar, Amazon and Boston Scientific were down after their results. Despite this volatility, both the S&P and Nasdaq were up about 1% as of Thursday’s close. Our NPM Private Market Tracker*, which shows the average price performance of the 50 largest names in our internal NPM Price data, is up ~105% YTD versus the S&P 500/Nasdaq each up ~13% YTD. (Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, NPM Daq)

At the start of 2026 we were optimistic about the IPO market opening up this year, led by the mega-listing of SpaceX and possibly one or both of Anthropic and OpenAI. While the sheer size of the SpaceX IPO has made 2026 one for the books, the number of companies going public has been less than impressive. In the first three quarters of 2026, companies raised ~$147 billion of proceeds from IPOs (up 300%+ yoy owing to the SpaceX IPO), but the number of companies going public was down a little over 30% yoy at 112 versus 161 for the first three quarters of 2025 (Renaissance Capital 3Q 2026 Quarterly Review, 10/1/26, note these numbers include direct listings with a market cap of at least $50 million and don’t include SPACs).

Several companies have delayed or withdrawn their IPOs since Labor Day, including smart ring maker Oura, data center companies Firmus and Nscale, insurance company Bamboo, fleet software company Motive, and Holtec nuclear (which designs reactors and manages spent nuclear fuel). In fact, Anthropic’s S-1 this past week was one of the only highlights in the pipeline.

Why the stall in the IPO market?

Most of the time companies generally cite general “market conditions” for delaying an IPO. A few specific drivers stand out to us:

• Rate hikes. The Fed’s quarter point rate hike in September elicited a negative response from equity markets, as higher interest rates weigh on the present value of future earnings for high-priced or growth stocks. While the Fed held rates steady this past week, consensus estimates per Bloomberg are for another hike this year (Reuters, 10/28).
• Concern around AI spending. With surging spending on AI across the US economy, the second half of this year has seen the market scratch its head about when the payoff might come and how large it will be. This has also shown up in the credit markets, which are important for this capital intensive buildout. Raising cash for data centers has become more difficult and more expensive, with yields on some financing deals reaching the double-digits and credit default swap (CDS) levels on investment-grade rated companies reaching spreads wider than those typical of junk-rated borrowers (Bloomberg, 10/29). See our analysis of the recent credit market trends here: Debt Doesn’t Hallucinate, Part 2: Developments in AI Debt Markets. Higher borrowing costs raise concerns about equity returns for data center companies and others who might be reliant on debt and looking to go public.
• Sector haves and have-nots. We also note that while the Nasdaq and S&P indices are both still up for the year, performance has been highly concentrated in tech names such as Nvidia, Apple, Micron and AMD; in fact, share prices for over 200 companies in the S&P 500 are down this year (Reuters, 10/12/26). In other words, some sectors have seen valuation dynamics ripe for IPOs, while other sectors have not been fertile ground. This makes for choppy IPO waters.
  
  SpaceX, tech company Bending Spoons and manufacturing company Arxis are up from their IPO prices. But others like Cerebras (also a chip company), Quantinuum (quantum computing), Innio (energy technology) and Pershing Square (financial) are down from their IPO prices.
• Large companies take up all the oxygen in the room? Anthropic’s IPO might be holding others back this fall. Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange, said at a conference on 10/28 that Anthropic’s huge IPO could be consuming a disproportionate amount of portfolio manager attention to the detriment of other IPOs in the pipeline (The Information, 10/28).
  
  While we did not find commentary that SpaceX’s IPO held back other IPOs in the space sector, its presence as an investment option may be one reason other public space stocks have had dismal performances since its IPO. Most hit their 52-week highs in May right before the IPO, and they are now down an average of ~70% from those highs (PayloadPro, 10/28).
• Company-specific factors hit valuation. While macro drivers such as rates and AI sentiment can certainly affect market conditions across the board, deal-specific issues can affect IPO valuation expectations as well. For example, investors may have had concerns about Oura’s valuation based on the future outlook – the track record of single-product hardware products such as Fitbit and GoPro may have given investors pause even though the company may have sought a valuation based on a broader, AI-enabled digital health platform (Yahoo Finance, 10/6). In addition, ~70% of the deal was for shares being sold by existing shareholders rather than for new capital going to the company, which may have given some investors pause (Yahoo Finance, 10/6).
• Macro valuation disconnects. Private markets tend to move more slowly than public markets because they are less liquid and because share trading tends to cluster around recent priced rounds rather than daily sentiment swings or (for example) moves in interest rates. The fact that our NPM private market tracker is up over 100% this year versus the S&P and Nasdaq in the low teens is evidence of some disconnect. Public investors may be giving private companies a bit of a reality check on their valuations, at least for the time being. We have written about the fast and furious pace of capital raises in the private markets this year (Fast and Furious: Private Capital Raising Deals are Accelerating – Nasdaq Private Market, with companies in popular sectors such as AI and defense tech raising rounds in quicker succession and with larger valuation step ups than they have in the past. Underlying demand in the industries of companies that have delayed their IPOs is likely still healthy, but if they are used to private rounds that move “up and to the right”, volatile public markets might show them valuations that are unpalatable.

What’s the implication for private markets?

None of this is to say that the IPO market is closed for companies , and we do not think private market investors need to worry about exit opportunities just yet. More-stable rate/debt market conditions and a more sanguine outlook for the AI trade could unblock the current pipeline, and sub-sectors with positive dynamics could still see high demand. On the valuation front, private market valuations need not come down, they may just need to wait for public market sentiment to improve. Finally, M&A could still be an exit ramp for companies if the IPO window closes as companies look to reposition themselves in the new AI landscape, drive growth or fill strategic gaps (The Information, 10/28).

Based on our proprietary NPM Price data, the best performers of the large cap names in the private market thus far in 2026 have been:

AI inference infrastructure provider Modal Labs is now the top performer after it raised a $750 million Series D at a $15.75 billion valuation, more than triple its previous valuation of $4.65 billion earlier this year (TechCrunch, 9/28).

Based on our proprietary NPM Price data using weighted averages for each sector, the top performing sectors YTD taking into account the top 100 largest names are Climate and Sustainability (191%), AI and Machine Learning (159%), Consumer (+117%), Healthcare/Life Sciences (+81%) and Industrials (+61%).

1. 01
   Intel’s shares dropped 20% on Thursday after earnings showed a slump in its business for PC processors; Google slumped as well owing to sluggish revenue growth in its core search advertising business; Amazon shares were down after earnings as well despite strong cloud revenue growth. (The Information, 10/29). Earlier in the week, CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon Web Services is largely sold out of capacity into 2028 (The Information, 10/26).
2. 02
   Google will sell its tensor processing units (TPUs) to Oracle and OpenAI (The Information, 10/28).
3. 03
   Anthropic filed its long-awaited S-1, which included an $81 billion net loss on $16 billion of revenues in 1H2026 as well as stating that its technology could “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” (Axios, 10/26). It also disclosed that it plans to spend $114.5 billion with Google Cloud and an additional $125-150 billion on TPUs with Google and other providers (The Information, 10/27).
4. 04
   SpaceX said that it secured $40 billion in debt financing with Apollo to buy GPUs (Bloomberg, 10/26).
5. 05
   Broadcom arranged a $63 billion deal with Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi and Morgan Stanley to finance the purchase of chips for Anthropic (Bloomberg, 10/26).
6. 06
   Meta said that it will seek up to $97.5 billion in equity financing to fund its AI buildout, with Nvidia and AMD investing $3 billion and $1 billion, respectively, in the deal (Reuters, 10/27). Alphabet sold $12.4 billion worth of shares in the third quarter as part of an at-the-market program announced earlier this year (The Information, 10/29).
7. 07
   The CFTC is investigating Polymarket again over whether it violated a 2022 settlement to keep US users off of its offshore prediction market (StrictlyVC, 10/27).
8. 08
   Amazon also secured FCC approval for its acquisition of space/satellite/spectrum company Globalstar (Via Satellite, 10/28).
9. 09
   Apollo agreed to buy nearly a 10% stake in Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Capital (Wall Street Journal, 10/26).
10. 10
    The Fed held interest rates steady even after a hot September CPI print (Wall Street Journal, 10/28).
11. 11
    Brazilian equity markets swooned and the real weakened on the surprise victory of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in an election over Flavio Bolsonaro (son of previous president Jair Bolsonaro) after Flavio Bolsonaro won the first round of voting (Bloomberg, 10/26).

1. 01
   Forge Nano, which makes high-nickel batteries, went public via a SPAC (The Information, 10/25).
2. 02
   Heroic Empire Acquisition (SPAC) filed for an IPO (Axios, 10/28).
3. 03
   Intel agreed to acquire Classiq, an Israeli quantum software startup, for $2.3 billion (Axios, 10/28).