The statement was light on details and did not specify the planned offering size or where it will list. For its most recent funding round, a $65 billion Series H funding announced last week, the San Francisco company more than doubled its post-money valuation to a staggering $965 billion.

With that round, Anthropic also surpassed its closest rival, , in terms of last reported valuation. In February, OpenAI announced it had closed a $110 billion round at an $840 billion post-money valuation.

Anthropic has now raised roughly $125 billion from investors, per Crunchbase data.

The path to the public markets

The IPO filing marks an escalation in the race among generative AI behemoths to make it first to the public market. That said, it could still be while.

Before making its market debut, Anthropic must still receive a sign-off from securities regulators on its confidential filing. After that, it will need to submit its public filing, carry out its pre-IPO roadshow, and put the remaining pieces in place for an offering of this presumed magnitude.

How long could it take? It’s unclear, of course, but if we use as a proxy, things could proceed briskly. SpaceX, which is reportedly seeking a valuation of $1.8 trillion or more, submitted its confidential filing on April 1. The company is expected to begin trading this month, with multiple reports citing June 12 as the target date.

If Anthropic follows a similar timeline, we could potentially see a market debut in August. Before that, however, will be the public filing of its IPO prospectus, which will offer a long-awaited peek under the hood at Anthropic’s famously fast revenue growth and the scope of the capital expenditures it has taken to get there.

As someone who has used the word boring in IPO market headlines many times in the past, one thing that can assuredly be said is that word no longer applies.

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Related reading:

• Anthropic Nears $1T Valuation And Leapfrogs OpenAI On Unicorn Board With $65B Funding Round
• OpenAI’s New $110B Raise At A $840B Valuation Marks The Largest Venture Deal Ever

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Every year for the past several years, the same prediction circulates: This is the year the IPO market comes back. We said it in 2025. We said it in 2026. We’ll probably say it again in 2027.

And every year, a handful of headline-grabbing offerings get held up as proof. This cycle it’s , and . The narrative writes itself: the window is open, the giants are listing, the market is back.

But here’s the catch: those aren’t IPOs for the rest of the market. They’re exceptions to a rule that has been hardening for 30 years.

The IPO market isn’t closed. It’s shrinking.

The instinct is to treat the IPO drought as cyclical, a consequence of rate hikes, market volatility or investor risk appetite. Fix the macro, the thinking goes, and the listings follow.

The data doesn’t support that story.

In 1996, more than 8,000 companies were listed on U.S. stock exchanges. Today, fewer than 4,000 are, even as the U.S. economy has tripled in size.

The bar to go public has moved in one direction.

In 1980, the median company went public with around $64 million in revenue in today’s dollars. Today, the typical IPO candidate has revenue that would have made it a mid-cap public company a generation ago.

The result: Companies are staying private far longer, and the liquidity that shareholders were counting on keeps getting pushed out.

Every time the IPO window “reopens,” it reopens at a higher threshold than before. Waiting for conditions to return to historical norms isn’t a strategy. It’s a bet against a structural trend that has outlasted every rate cycle, bull market and recovery in recent memory.

The companies left behind

When the bar rises high enough, it doesn’t just delay IPOs. It eliminates them.

There are thousands of private companies in the United States today with $50 million, $100 million, $200 million in annual revenue, with continued growth. Previously, companies at that scale formed the backbone of the public markets. Today they’re still private, and most will stay that way.

Not all of them are great businesses. Some raised at 2021 peak valuations and are quietly running out of runway. But a real subset has grown past the early venture stage. They have revenue, margins and years of operating history. The IPO was supposed to be the exit. For most of them, it won’t be.

Who’s actually suffering

Employees at these companies made a bet: below-market salaries, equity instead of cash, years of building. Their equity was supposed to be liquid by now. It isn’t. Meanwhile, life has continued: mortgages, children, aging parents, career crossroads.

I lived this at . When I left, exercising my options triggered a tax bill I couldn’t afford without finding liquidity for shares I didn’t know how to sell. The market for these shares exists in theory. In practice it’s opaque, fragmented and slow. A transaction that should take weeks can take months, if it closes at all.

Venture general partners are in a different bind. Their funds are locked in companies with no exit path. Distributed to Paid-In capital is near historic lows. Limited partners who expected returns from prior vintage funds are still waiting, either holding back re-commitments or concentrating capital into the megafunds that can generate deal flow regardless of exit conditions. The mid-tier manager without DPI is struggling to raise.

A small number of the most prominent companies can run tender offers, giving employees a company-sponsored, structured opportunity to sell their shares.

For everyone else, there are brokered secondary marketplaces that work, slowly and imperfectly, for a narrow slice of the most in-demand names. According to , 90% of all venture secondary volume was concentrated in just 15 companies last quarter. For the rest, the market barely functions.

We’ve been here before

This situation has a historical parallel most people in finance have forgotten.

In the late 1800s, the was the only legitimate listing venue, and it was selective. Hundreds of real companies couldn’t meet the requirements, so brokers took matters into their own hands. They gathered on Broad Street, outside the NYSE, and began trading unlisted stocks on the curb. Literally on the sidewalk. It was chaotic, informal, fragmented. No centralized pricing. No standardized process. No real infrastructure.

But the companies were real. And the demand was real.

Over time, the curb traders organized. They moved indoors. They built rules and infrastructure. The Curb Market became the . The companies that traded there weren’t defective, the system was.

The private secondary market today looks a lot like that sidewalk. Fragmented brokers. Inconsistent pricing. Transactions that depend on who you know. The companies being traded are real. The demand is real. The infrastructure doesn’t exist yet, but it’s coming. Markets that serve real economic needs don’t stay informal forever.

The original Curb Market didn’t fail. It grew up. What’s happening in private secondaries today will do the same. The only variable is timing, and the shareholders waiting on liquidity are the ones absorbing the cost of that delay.

�� is the founder of and managing partner of Earlyasset Capital, where he is building infrastructure for and investing in the venture secondary market. Earlier in his career, he was part of the original founding team at .

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Related reading:

• The IPO Window Won’t Stay Open On Its Own
• Forecast: 2024 Was Slow For Tech IPOs, But 2025 Could Be Different
• Crunchbase Predicts: IPOs Picked Up In 2025 And The Outlook For 2026 Is Even More Optimistic

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At least not these days. The space and AI pioneer posted a net loss of $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up more than 700% from a year ago. Revenue, meanwhile, totaled $4.69 billion in Q1, up 15% from a year ago.

As a public company, SpaceX is reportedly seeking a valuation of around $1.5 trillion or more, . It’s aiming to raise up to $80 billion or more in the offering, which would make it the largest IPO in history.

At its target valuation, SpaceX would join a rarified club of just seven U.S. public technology companies with market caps of $1.5 trillion or more. Of those, just five have crossed the $2 trillion mark.

Of course, those companies took time to grow into their 13-digit valuations. But at some point, they too made their first public IPO filings. And they too had revenue.

The similarities end there. For a sense of how SpaceX compares at IPO time to other members of the trillion-plus-club, we took a look at their original S-1s from the 1980s and onward. Here’s what their numbers looked like just before their public market debuts:

: Today, the Silicon Valley chip designer is a $5.3 trillion market cap company. Anyone who invested in its 1999 IPO, needless to say, has done extraordinarily well.

At the time of its market debut, of course, such a trajectory was not obvious. Still, it looked like a solid bet. The company, which then focused on designing 3D graphics processors for the PC market, had $93 million in revenue for the three reported quarters prior to its IPO, growing severalfold year over year. Over the same period, it posted a modest $3.5 million loss.

: Google was already the dominant player in online search when it went public in 2004, with impressive financials to boot. Revenue for the first half of that year totaled $1.35 billion, more than doubling in a year, paired with a $326 million profit.

While that was impressive, so is Google’s ongoing growth. Currently, its market cap is $4.7 trillion and it posts more than $400 billion in annual revenue, with massive profits as well.

: The iconic smartphone and computing giant knows a thing or two about longevity. Apple turned 50 last month, and it went public over 45 years ago, in 1980.

It was an impressive and attention-getting offering for the time, with $118 million in sales and nearly $12 million in profit. It helped that Apple was already a prominent consumer brand at the time due to its popular home computers. These days, its market cap hovers around $4.5 trillion.

: Microsoft went public in 1986, so it’s had some 40 years to grow into its current $3.1 trillion valuation. But even back in the era of big hair and floppy disks, the software giant’s IPO prospectus showed clear signs this would be no ordinary market entrant.

In the year before its IPO, Microsoft had revenue of $140 million and net income of $24 million. That income figure, however, includes stepped-up spending on marketing and R&D. Without those expenses, profit margins looked astoundingly high for a time before software business models were status quo.

: At the time of its public offering in 1997, Amazon was known as an online bookseller, branding itself as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” All the other stuff came later.

Still, it was a compelling offering at the time, with Amazon growing annual sales from zilch to around $16 million in just two-and-half years after its inception. It pitched losses as part of its growth strategy, which called for investing heavily in marketing and promotion, site development and operating infrastructure.

Needless to say, things worked out well, with Amazon currently valued at more than $2.8 trillion.

SpaceX is not like the others

If we look at the most valuable public tech companies, a few commonalities about their earlier days stand out. All went public relatively early in their operating histories and debuted with sharply growing revenue and either profits or losses in the single-digit millions.

SpaceX, founded in 2002, looks by comparison like an oldster for a company on the cusp of a public market debut. It’s also worth pointing out that Google, founded in 1998, is only four years older than SpaceX. That means, it’s had 28 years to grow into becoming a company with over $400 billion in revenue over the past 12 months and $138 billion in operating income.

SpaceX, by contrast, has had 24 years to grow into becoming a company that loses $4.3 billion in a single quarter.

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• SpaceX IPO At $1.5T Valuation Would Be 10x Larger Than Biggest VC-Backed Listing Of All Time
• The IPO Pipeline Finally Gets Interesting
• PwC’s US IPO Lead On The 2026 Outlook, IPO Timing And The Secondary Boom
• IPOs Are Holding Up In 2026, But SaaS Debuts Aren’t Happening

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Just through mid-May, China-based robotics companies this year have raised $5.6 billion across 176 deals, Crunchbase data shows. That sum matches total investment to the nation’s robotics companies in all of 2021, the peak of the funding cycle. Investment in the sector has also already eclipsed the $4.3 billion raised by China-based robotics companies in all of 2025.

Startup funding in Asia overall surged to $27.4 billion in Q1, its highest level in over three years, with China capturing $16.5 billion — 60% — of that total, according to recent Crunchbase data. Robotics contributed meaningfully to that $16.5 billion total, with startups in the sector raising $3.3 billion across 126 deals.

Embodied AI boom

A review of Crunchbase data shows that investors now are no longer funding mostly pre-programmed hardware, but increasingly backing China-based startups working on embodied AI —��or artificial intelligence with a physical body that interacts with the real world in real time.

That shift toward artificial intelligence-driven robotics mirrors a global surge in investment into robotics and other physical AI startups. It’s also thanks to the rise of advanced, open-source reasoning models that have fundamentally changed how robots operate. Startups are moving away from coding robots line-by-line toward Vision-Language-Action models that allow physical machines to observe, reason and execute physical tasks end-to-end.

In China, robotics startups at the intersection of the software and hardware integration are drawing the largest checks in the space and often back-to-back funding rounds. They include:

• , a 1-year-old humanoid robotics company that integrates embodied intelligence that last month raised a massive $513 million seed round led by and . The Shanghai-based company was valued at $1.9 billion.
• , which develops robotic systems and automation solutions for industrial and service applications, closed a $140 million Series A extension round in January from investors including . Then just three months later, it raised $293 million in a massive Series B round co-led by and
• In February, Beijing-based , which says it’s building a “universal brain” for robots, raised a $290 million Series A led by and . The 2-year-old company was valued at $1.5 billion. Then in April, it announced a $145 million Series A extension financing, bringing the total round to $435 million.
• Humanoid robotics company in February raised a $145 million Series B led by . The 2-year-old China-based company was valued at $1.4 billion. In April, it announced a $290 million extension to that round, bringing its total to $435 million
• Shenzhen-based , a builder of humanoid and quadruped robots, raised a $200 million Series B last month led by and . The 2-year-old company’s robots will be deployed for traffic, security and retail. It was valued at $1.5 billion.

Top investors

Crunchbase data shows the most active investors in the space are largely Asia-based. The busiest this year has been Hong Kong-based , taking part in six deals, including a $200 million round last month for humanoid robotics and embodied intelligence developer .

Among lead or co-lead investors, three China-based firms — , and — have each taken part this year in deals totaling $290 million or more.

Exits gain steam

Venture investors are likely feeling confident as the sector notches notable liquidity events, including IPOs and acquisitions.

The of , targeting a $3 billion to $7 billion valuation, is a milestone for the industry. The company in March filed for an to list on the , and its IPO would likely spur other startups in the space to pursue their own public-market debuts.

The sector has already seen some notable exits.

They include Hong Kong-based ,�� a Shanghai-based startup that makes lightweight industrial robots. The company on May 18 listed on the , raising about $86 million. And it did not disappoint. Robotphoenix closed its first full day of trading at HK$53.75 ($6.86 U.S.), up nearly 80%. (Interestingly, Chinese robotics firms as their primary liquidity hub.)

On the M&A front, in what is widely considered a historic first for China’s embodied artificial intelligence sector, AI robotics unicorn in July 2025 engineered a two-stage consortium takeover to in legacy manufacturer for about $290 million. AgiBot’s co-founder formally stepped in to chair Swancor, effectively turning the publicly traded shell into a direct extension of AgiBot.

Ultimately, it seems that 2026 is the year China’s robotics companies are pivoting from raising early venture rounds to mass production, as a domestic market that currently accounts for more than 43% of global robotics venture investment, per Crunchbase.

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• China Leads Asia’s Startup Funding To Its Highest Level In More Than 3 Years
• Amid Record Robotics Funding, Apptronik Raises $520M Series A Extension To Boost Production Of Humanoid Robot Apollo

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Global venture funding to financial technology startups totaled $12 billion across 751 deals in 2026 as of April 6, per Crunchbase . That’s a 5% increase in dollars raised compared to the $11.4 billion raised across 1,097 — or 31.5% fewer —��deals during the same time period in 2025.

This trend signals larger deal sizes. Indeed, late-stage or growth funding in the first quarter of 2026 totaled $6.9 billion, up 8% compared to $6.4 billion raised at those stages in the 2025 first quarter.

However, sequentially, the $12 billion raised is down 33% compared to the fourth quarter of 2025, when fintech startups raised $17.8 billion globally. The $6.9 billion raised in late-stage or growth funding is also down markedly — by 43% — compared to the $12.1 billion raised by fintech startups in Q4 2025.

The trend in the first quarter also mirrors what we saw in 2025 as a whole, with global venture funding to fintech startups climbing to its highest level in several quarters, boosted by later-stage deals.

Total global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $53.8 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase . That’s an approximately 29.3% increase from 2024’s total of $41.6 billion raised.

US booms

U.S.-based startups have historically raised more fintech funding than any other country in the world, and the first quarter of 2026 was no different.

Of the $12 billion raised by startups globally, just over half — or $6.3 billion — flowed to fintech companies based in the U.S. That was an impressive 47% increase compared to the $4.3 billion raised by U.S. fintech startups in the 2025 first quarter. However, it was down 50% from the $12.6 billion that U.S. financial technology startups raised in the fourth quarter of 2025.

The United Kingdom was the second-largest recipient of venture capital, with startups in the region raising a total of $1.2 billion. India came in third, raising $900 million.

Big deals for unicorns

Several fintech startups raised nine-figure rounds in the first quarter, with some doubling their valuations since their last venture financings.

Predictions marketplace was the largest recipient of capital in the first quarter. In March, the company doubled its valuation to $22 billion in just three months with a $1 billion raise led by . The New York-based startup had just raised $1 billion in Series E funding at an $11 billion valuation in December.

In February, , a digital savings platform, raised $385 million in a Series E funding round co-led by and . The New York-based startup said its new valuation was $2 billion, double it achieved when raising its $125 million Series D round in December 2023.

And in January, , which is building infrastructure for payments with stablecoins, raised $250 million in a Series C funding round led by . Its post-money valuation was $1.95 billion, up 17x from last March.

Investors remain bullish

, partner and head of U.S. at , said his firm has been investing at a slightly slower pace so far in 2026 than in years past. But he cited it as “more a quirk of deal flow” and where it gets conviction, rather than a decision to slow the firm’s investing pace.

“It’s certainly true that macroeconomics and geopolitics play a role,” he told Crunchbase News, “but mostly we’re just focused on finding high-conviction companies to back.”

QED is extremely bullish on the application layer for AI in fintech and stablecoin opportunities, and has backed several startups that Gerety said “harness the power of LLMs with the security and reliability guarantees that finance needs.” (, which raised a $45 million Series B in January and is building an AI assistant for financial advisers, is one of those companies.)

“Just in the last few months, agents are now actually able to be effective in many processing tasks, but the stakes in finance are too high for LLMs to conquer financial workflows alone,” Gerety said. “Finance runs on trust, not probability.”

Looking ahead, he said QED remains bullish on fintech overall for the year. Part of the excitement is around the fact that larger companies are “transforming” their operations with agentic workflows, Gerety noted.

“More and more transformation is moving from the ‘co-pilot’ phase, and we’re moving into the ‘OpenClaw’ phase, when reasoning agents will start to actually do all the work that was too tedious and slow to be done manually,” he added.

The geopolitical situation will likely hinder some companies from taking the IPO plunge, in Gerety’s view, although a few companies in QED’s portfolios are “bubbling.”

, partner at , said his firm is on track to make eight to 10 core investments in Seed or Series A companies this year — about the same number as in previous years.

“We’re investing in AI-enabled applications while maintaining patience and focus in our deployment of capital,” he said. “We look for durable, enduring businesses that we believe will withstand the current hype cycle and investment frenzy.”

While TTV is investing in AI-enabled companies, Kapur said it also agrees with that “an AI reset is coming.”

“Many investors have already made their money by getting in on the ground floor, and others are trying to replicate their success,” he told Crunchbase News. “We’re focused on investing in the application layer of AI, and we’re still in the early days with more widespread prosperity and a democratization of enterprise value creation yet to come.”

In particular, TTV sees the biggest opportunity in early-stage AI-native companies that are solving problems in mission-critical workflows “while building durable moats.”

“These platforms will earn the right to be distribution endpoints for financial products … and are even more valuable in the age of AI,” he said.

He believes we may see some fintech IPOs in 2026, but that they will largely depend on how the potential mega IPOs (from the likes of , and ) perform.

“If those IPOs underperform, others may opt to stay private longer,” Kapur said.

Looking ahead, he predicts we’ll continue to see accelerated adoption of AI in financial services, first through straightforward applications, then more operationally complex use cases.

“More broadly, we’re watching how the foundational LLMs further move up into the application layer, which is imperative to the long-term sustainability of their business models,” Kapur said. “We think financial services and fintech are unique enough categories where de novo startups and standalone businesses will beat platforms building experimental applications.”

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• Fintech Funding Jumped 27% In 2025 With Fewer Deals But Bigger Checks
• Kalshi Secures $1B To Expand Predictions Market Platform
• Digital Savings Startup Vestwell Lands $385M, Doubles Valuation
• Stablecoin Startup Rain Raises $250M Series C at $1.95B Valuation – Its Third Round In Less Than A Year
• Exclusive: Zocks Raises $45M Series B From Lightspeed, QED For AI Assistant To Financial Advisers

Illustration:

The first quarter of 2026 was unlike any other for venture investment, driven by unprecedented spending on AI compute and frontier labs. Crunchbase data shows investors poured $300 billion into 6,000 startups globally in the quarter, up over 150% quarter over quarter and year over year.

That marks an all-time high for global venture investment not approached by any other quarter on record. In fact, startup investment in the first quarter of 2026 alone totaled close to 70% of all venture capital spending in 2025. The quarterly sum also tops all full-year investment totals prior to 2018.

Q1’s startup investment largely went to AI startups and disproportionately to a handful of U.S.-based companies in record-setting deals. Four of the five largest venture rounds ever recorded were closed in Q1 2026, with frontier labs ($122 billion), ($30 billion), ($20 billion) and self-driving company ($16 billion) collectively raising $188 billion, or 65% of global venture investment in the quarter.

Overall, AI shattered records last quarter, with $242 billion — 80% of total global venture funding in Q1— going to companies in the sector. The previous record was set in Q1 2025, when AI accounted for 55% of global venture funding.

Table of Contents

• Valuation surge, capital concentration
• US above 80%
• Late-stage hike
• Early stage up over 40%
• Seed funding up over 30%
• IPO slowdown, M&A pick up
• Public pressure
• Methodology
• Glossary of funding terms

Valuation surge, capital concentration

Along with the three major frontier labs and Waymo, another 10 companies raised funding rounds of $1 billion or more in Q1, in sectors spanning generative and physical AI, autonomous vehicles, semiconductors, data centers, robotics, defense and prediction markets.

Those outsized rounds pushed overall startup valuations higher in Q1. The Crunchbase Unicorn Board added $900 billion in value during the quarter, marking the largest valuation bump in a single quarter.

US above 80%

U.S.-based companies raised $250 billion, or 83% of global venture capital in Q1, Crunchbase data shows. That’s up significantly from 71% in Q1 2025, which was already well above historical averages in the decade before 2024.

The second-largest market globally for venture funding in Q1 was China, with $16.1 billion invested. The U.K. followed, with $7.4 billion invested. Both countries were up quarter over quarter and even more significantly year over year.

Late-stage hike

The Q1 funding surge was concentrated in late-stage funding, which reached $246.6 billion — up 205% year over year — across 584 deals. A total of $235 billion was invested in 158 late-stage companies that raised rounds of $100 million and more.

Early stage up over 40%

Early-stage funding totaled $41.3 billion across 1,800 deals, Crunchbase data shows.

Funding was up marginally quarter over quarter but up 41% year over year from $29.4 billion. Much of that increase went to Series A rounds, Crunchbase data shows. Series B deals were down quarter over quarter but still up year over year.

Seed funding up over 30%

Seed funding totaled $12 billion, up 31% year over year, though the increase was entirely due to larger rounds, with deal counts falling 30% year over year to 3,800.

IPO slowdown, M&A pick up

Record venture investment in U.S. companies did not translate into a stronger IPO market in Q1.

In fact, the U.S. market for new listings slowed in Q1 amid a broader stock market selloff in software, although China’s IPO market picked up.

A total of 21 venture-backed companies exited globally above $1 billion in Q1. Thirteen of those were from China, four more from elsewhere in Asia, and four from the U.S.

The largest IPO in Q1 was Japan-based , a fintech for mobile payments valued at $10 billion upon listing.�� Two foundation lab companies from China — and — debuted on the , each valued at more than $6 billion.

While the IPO market was somewhat lackluster, startup M&A was strong in Q1 with exits cumulatively valued north of $56.6 billion, Crunchbase data shows. That marked the third-highest startup M&A quarter since the downturn of 2022.

The largest M&A deals in Q1 were ’s $6 billion planned acquisition of ’s gaming platform , and ’s planned $5.15 billion acquisition of fintech startup .

Public pressure

While frontier lab megarounds defined Q1 2026, a closer look at the data shows every startup funding stage grew last quarter, as did round sizes across the board.

And unlike the cloud and mobile era, this cycle is also being built in the physical world, with massive capital flowing not just into software, but infrastructure, autonomous vehicles, robotics and manufacturing.

Now, with startup valuations surging and a backlog of companies with unprecedented sums of private capital behind them, pressure is intensifying on the IPO markets to reopen in 2026.

Related Crunchbase queries:

Methodology

The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data is as of March 31, 2026.

Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Glossary of funding terms

Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less.

Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million.

Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round.

Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.)

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To understand what’s holding the IPO market back and what could unlock it, Crunchbase News recently spoke with , U.S. IPO services leader at , via email. He discussed how companies are rethinking IPO timing this year, how investor expectations have shifted since the 2021 boom, and why the next wave of large listings could raise the bar for smaller and mid-cap tech companies.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Crunchbase News: How are companies thinking about timing, pricing and capital needs in this uncertain market?

Bellin: The companies we work with have become significantly more sophisticated in their approach to all three dimensions, and the most important shift we’ve seen is a move away from calendar-driven thinking toward readiness-driven thinking.

On timing, companies are no longer asking “when is the window?” They’re asking, “Are we ready when the window opens?” That’s a meaningful evolution.

After years of intermittent issuance windows, late-stage companies have learned hard lessons about the cost of being caught flat-footed. The companies that priced successfully in 2025 had invested 18 to 24 months in advance in governance upgrades, financial reporting infrastructure, and refinement of their equity story.

That institutional preparation is now table stakes. As we’ve noted in our , market windows can open and close quickly, which makes continuous readiness and flexibility essential, regardless of where macro conditions stand on any given day.

On pricing, there’s been a healthy reset in expectations. The exuberance of 2021, when companies could access the market at growth multiples untethered from near-term fundamentals, is not what we’re operating in today.

Investors today are paying a premium for scaled, cash-generative stories with clear paths to profitability. That means founders and their boards have had harder conversations about the right price relative to where comparable public companies trade, rather than anchoring to the last private-round valuations.

The good news is that median pre-money valuations have begun to rise for the first time since 2021, particularly for AI-enabled businesses and later-stage companies with clear profitability trajectories. The reset isn’t a permanent discount; it’s a quality filter.

On capital needs, we’re seeing more disciplined thinking about sizing. Nearly every company going public targets a raise that covers 18 to 24 months of operations, ideally through to profitability.

What’s changed is that companies are also thinking harder about their post-IPO capital structure: How do the IPO proceeds interact with existing debt, what is the all-in cost of capital as a public company, and how does the public currency (stock) open doors for strategic M&A or talent retention?

The best-prepared companies treat the IPO not just as a fundraiser but as a balance-sheet transformation.

It feels like the IPO market is moving more slowly so far this year than expected. Why do you think that is? Do you expect it will pick up?

There are several factors at play, and it’s worth separating the structural from the situational.

On the situational side, the October-to-November 2025 government shutdown had a materially disruptive effect on the capital markets calendar that is still being felt. The SEC reported that issuers filed more than 900 registration statements during the shutdown, all of which required review and processing once operations resumed. That backlog doesn’t clear overnight.

Companies that had been in process for a Q4 2025 or early Q1 2026 launch found themselves delayed, recalibrating roadshow timing, and in some cases choosing to wait for the market to absorb other supply first. So, some of the slowness we’re seeing in early 2026 is the shadow of that disruption.

On the structural side, macro uncertainty — including tariff policy, interest rate trajectory, and geopolitical volatility — has raised the bar for when boards and investors feel confident enough to move forward. Companies are increasingly patient because they have deep pools of private capital supporting them. That optionality is valuable, but it also means that when uncertainty spikes, the default decision is to wait.

That said, we do expect the market to pick up, and we’re cautiously optimistic about the balance of the year. The underlying fundamentals for the IPO market are strong: 2025 demonstrated healthy investor appetite for high-quality offerings, traditional IPOs raised the most proceeds since 2021, and the backlog of IPO-ready companies entering 2026 is among the largest in a decade, with more than 800 unicorns that have now spent additional years strengthening their balance sheets and operating discipline.

As the clears its backlog and macro visibility improves, we expect activity to accelerate, particularly in AI infrastructure, software and specialty risk. The first few deals of any re-opening tend to be conservatively priced to rebuild confidence, and if those hold their post-IPO performance, the door widens for the cohort behind them.

What sorts of companies do you expect to hit the public market this year?

Based on where investor appetite is concentrated, we see the strongest IPO pipeline in several distinct sectors. AI infrastructure, including data centers, power capacity, and chip-adjacent services, leads the pack.

Physical AI: Investor demand for direct exposure to the physical layer of the AI economy is significant, and large-scale, capital-intensive businesses in this space have been able to command premium valuations. The 2025 AI infrastructure IPO set a powerful precedent: Institutional investors proved willing to underwrite capital-intensive, high-growth models when the contracted revenue visibility is strong.

AI-enabled software: This also continues to be a top investor preference. The key distinction from earlier software cycles is that investors are no longer willing to pay high multiples purely on growth. They want to see that AI is genuinely embedded in the product, that net dollar retention is strong, and that the path to margin expansion is credible. Platforms with high switching costs and essential utility are commanding the best multiples.

Insurance and specialty risk: This sector had a strong 2025, and that momentum is continuing into 2026. These businesses tend to offer the cash-flow predictability that institutional investors increasingly prize.

Industrials, aerospace and defense: These are also moving up the IPO pipeline, supported by reshoring policy tailwinds and supply-chain realignment.

How are these listings influencing the strategies of smaller and mid-cap tech companies?

It is real and somewhat sobering. High-profile listings serve as both a benchmark and a warning.

When a well-known, scaled company prices and trades well post-IPO, it recalibrates expectations across the sector, validating the category and giving smaller companies a comparable reference.

But it also raises the implied bar. Investors who have a scaled, cash-generative AI infrastructure company available at a $40 billion to $50 billion valuation will apply that lens to every software or infrastructure company in their pipeline.

Smaller companies are watching their larger peers closely and, in many cases, extending their private timelines. They use the interval to strengthen unit economics, hit profitability milestones, and build out the public company infrastructure (board composition, financial controls, investor relations capability) that institutional investors now expect to see in place on day one.

Given that 2026 has seen a massive surge in venture secondaries, is an IPO still the “Gold Standard” exit? Or is PwC seeing founders use secondaries to delay their IPO even further?

This is one of the most important structural questions in the private markets right now, and the honest answer is nuanced.

The IPO remains the aspirational end-state for most venture-backed companies. It provides the broadest access to capital, the most liquid currency for acquisitions and talent retention, and the clearest signal of institutional legitimacy. In that sense, it retains its status as the gold standard. But what has clearly changed is the sequencing and the role that secondaries play in getting there.

The secondary market has undergone a structural transformation. What was once considered a signal of distress — such as an insider selling before a company was “ready” for the public markets — has been normalized as a sophisticated liquidity tool.

As noted in our , nearly half of asset managers are already using continuation funds to unlock liquidity, and GP-led secondaries and continuation vehicles are now mainstream instruments. Secondary transaction volume surpassed $60 billion in 2025, and the market is projected to continue growing significantly in 2026. Secondaries are expected to remain the dominant exit route for private equity, with IPOs still accounting for only a limited share of total private equity exits.

For founders specifically, we see secondaries being used for several distinct and legitimate strategic purposes:

First, personal liquidity without forced exit timing. Founders who are a decade or more into building their companies have reasonable personal financial planning needs. Secondaries allow them to diversify without forcing the company into a public exit on a suboptimal timeline.

Second, employee retention. Extended hold periods have put pressure on the equity value of employees who joined years ago and expected a liquidity event. Secondary programs provide a release valve, allowing companies to retain talent they might otherwise lose.

Third, valuation discovery in a more forgiving setting. Private secondary pricing, while increasingly sophisticated, is still conducted without the full scrutiny of a public offering, allowing companies to establish a market-clearing price on their own terms.

What we caution founders about, however, is treating secondary access as a reason to indefinitely postpone the public markets journey. The median time to IPO for companies that went public in 2025 has reached over 11 years, the longest in a decade.

Extended private holding periods can be constructive, but they also delay price discovery, compress LP distributions, and ultimately reduce the competitive tension that keeps acquisition valuations high.

The IPO window is selective but open, and companies with the right fundamentals shouldn’t mistake the availability of secondary liquidity for permission to wait indefinitely.

Is PwC advising late-stage founders to prioritize GAAP profitability over top-line growth to satisfy the current “flight to quality” among institutional investors?

We’re not advising founders to make a binary choice between growth and profitability, but we are advising them to have a credible, investor-grade answer to both.

The market signal from 2025 and into 2026 has been clear: Institutional investors are no longer willing to pay premium multiples on growth alone. The “Rule of 40,” the principle that a company’s revenue growth rate plus its profit margin should exceed 40%, and which may now be more a rule of 60, has re-emerged as a baseline screening metric for public market investors evaluating software and tech businesses.

Investors are paying a premium for scaled, cash-generative stories with clear paths to profitability. The emphasis is on paths.

GAAP profitability at the IPO date is not a requirement, but an articulated, credible, time-bound roadmap to it absolutely is.

What has changed is the tolerance for ambiguity. In 2021, investors were willing to fund a narrative about future profitability at an indefinite horizon.

Today, they want to see demonstrated progress in unit economics, such as improving gross margins, reducing customer acquisition costs as a percentage of revenue, and expanding net dollar retention, paired with a specific operating-leverage story. When do sales and marketing efficiency improve? When does R&D spend as a percentage of revenue compress? Where does operating margin land at scale? These are questions that founders must be able to answer with precision, not just aspiration.

The GAAP-versus-non-GAAP debate is also something we work through carefully with companies. Adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP operating income are widely used and accepted, but institutional investors have become more sophisticated in looking through those metrics to understand certain adjustments as a real economic cost, and to evaluate true free cash flow generation.

Companies that present GAAP financials in a clear, transparent, investor-friendly way, rather than burying them under adjustments, tend to build more durable institutional credibility.

Our practical advice to late-stage founders is this: Make sure your growth spending is efficient and that every dollar of investment is generating measurably improving unit economics.

The investors we work with are sophisticated enough to reward capital-efficient growth with premium valuations and to discount growth that appears to require permanently escalating spending to sustain it.

Governance maturity, financial reporting infrastructure, and a compelling, data-supported equity story are as important to IPO success today as the top-line numbers themselves.

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In the less imaginative realm of venture funding, the term denotes a far less magical but much more visible creature: A space tech company with major funding and a valuation north of $1 billion.

These days, this more staid version of space unicorn is moving up the funding tallies at a faster-than-usual clip. More than two dozen companies in the sector have raised rounds of $100 million or more in the past year, per Crunchbase data.

Meanwhile, the biggest unicorn of all — 24-year-old — is reportedly seeking a valuation of around $1.5 trillion for an anticipated IPO later this year, featuring rocketry and satellite technology that should make even marshmallow lasers look primitive.

The broad trend: Unlike most startup sectors, which have seen uneven rebounds after hitting a funding peak over four years ago, space tech is hitting fresh highs. Contributing factors include public market enthusiasm for the sector, increased appetite for defense-related investments, and of course advances driving cheaper, more scalable and more technologically sophisticated orbital operations.

The numbers: Venture funding to companies in Crunchbase space tech and satellite categories hit a high last year of over $12 billion. So far, 2026 is off to a brisk start as well, with more than $2 billion in reported investment.

While investment is way up, round counts have remained flatter, as charted below.

Noteworthy rounds

Megarounds have been stacking up over the past six months.

By far the biggest of these was Kent, Washington-based , a developer of reusable rockets. The company announced a Series D extension in October that brought the total round size to $860 million.

Houston-based , which is developing a successor to the International Space Station, was a more recent mega-fundraiser, in new financing in February.

And in the satellite communications space, one of the larger financings came this week, as spinout , a developer of software that configures communications satellites to meet demand, secured funding.

For a bigger-picture view, below we put together a list of eight significant space- and satellite technology-related financings of the past six months.

Exits and more

The IPO market has also been receptive to space tech of late, although companies haven’t always held on to early gains.

One exemplar of this pattern is , a provider of launch, land and in-space services for national security and commercial customers, that went public in August. Shares of the Cedar Park, Texas-based company soared higher in initial trading but have subsequently shed about half their value.

, a Denver-based defense and space tech startup that went public in June, is also down from its initial trading price. On the flip side, , which went public early last year, is on a tear and was recently valued over $11 billion.

Meanwhile, it’s still early innings for space tech company , which went public just four weeks ago.

Heating up

Overall, in recent quarters space and satellite tech are looking like a sector in vogue. With large financings, regular IPO activity and a giant SpaceX offering on the horizon, we’re not seeing clear signs of a slowdown ahead for the space unicorn crowd.

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Over the past two calendar years, acquirers have agreed to pay more than $38 billion to purchase��1 venture-backed companies in Crunchbase biotech industry categories. So far, 2026 is off to a brisk start as well, with this month to pay up to $2.4 billion for , a startup focused on engineering immune cells in vivo.

Per Crunchbase data, 2025 and 2024 were two of the strongest years on record for biotech M&A. While we’re still below the 2021 peak, we’re also well past the subsequent low point, as charted below.

Largest deals in recent quarters

Since last year, at least nine funded U.S. biotech companies have sold in transactions valued at $1 billion or more, including potential milestone payments. Using Crunchbase , we assembled a list, ranked by deal size.

The largest deal was ’s purchase of , a developer of targeted oral therapies for solid tumors, for $3.05 billion in cash late last year. The pharma giant expressed particular interest in adding Halda’s clinical stage oral therapy for prostate cancer to its portfolio.

The two next-biggest acquisitions were both in the area of in vivo therapeutics, which enable a patient’s own body to generate cell therapies that can treat underlying disease.

One was Lilly’s aforementioned purchase of Watertown, Massachusetts-based Orna, which had�� previously raised over $320 million in venture funding from lead backers including , and .

The other was ’s mid-2025 acquisition of , a clinical-stage biotech developing targeted in vivo RNA technologies, with an initial focus on autoimmune diseases. AbbVie agreed to pay up to $2.1 billion in cash to acquire the San Diego-based startup,which previously raised $340 million in venture funding.

Biotech funding share slides, and IPO volume remains weak

While some large acquisitions are happening, the overall picture for biotech funding and exit activity looks more muted.

Last year, less than 9% of all U.S. startup funding went to companies in Crunchbase biotech categories. That’s the lowest share in years, and largely a function of more capital going to companies in other hot sectors like generative AI.

In terms of total finding, biotech looks more stable. In 2025, just over $25 billion went to U.S. startups in the space, roughly flat year over year.

IPO activity is lower than usual. Last year, just 21 biotech, pharma or medical device companies went public, per Crunchbase data, the lowest number in years.

So far this year, we’ve had four debuts, including most recently the debut this month of , a developer of cancer therapies recently valued around $900 million.

Not a slump, and not a boom

Overall, biotech funding and exit data paints a picture of a sector that’s neither booming nor in a protracted slump. That’s not the most exciting place to be, but it can be quite viable for quite a long time.

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• Biotech Share Of US Funding Hits Lowest Point In Crunchbase History
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The U.S. again dominated global funding with $38.7 billion — or around 70% of capital — invested in American companies last month, and capital also continued to concentrate into AI-centric startups.

However, on the IPO front, China led with two foundation model companies, and , debuting on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Capital concentration

Capital concentration was pronounced in January as AI continued to lead. A total of $40.9 billion (74% of all funding) went to rounds of $100 million and more, and $31.7 billion (57% of funding) went to AI-related companies.

More than a third, or 36%, of global venture funding in January went to a single U.S.-based model company. That was -led with its $20 billion Series E, which was funded by a mix of private equity, sovereign funds and strategic investors. (Early in February, Musk’s space exploration company announced its merger with xAI.)

Overall, the largest funding deals in January were in sectors that showed increased investor appetite unleashed by AI.

Ranked in order of largest first, investments between $500 million to $2 billion last month went to:

• Singapore-based data center provider ;
• Pittsburgh-based robotics intelligence company ;
• Toronto-based autonomous driving ;
• Shanghai-based model company ;
• San Francisco-based drone delivery ; and
• Cupertino’s Bay Area-based AI chip startup .

After AI, the leading sectors in January were hardware, with an emphasis on deep tech, followed by healthcare and biotech.

China model exits

While the U.S. led funding totals, China led on the exit front. Two AI model companies went public: Z.ai (also known as Zhipu AI) and MiniMax. Each was valued above $6 billion and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. MiniMax on its debut.

On the M&A front, the largest deal was banking giant ’s acquisition of spend management company for $5.15 billion, half its 2021 valuation of $12.3 billion.

Methodology

The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data reported is as of Jan. 4, 2026.

Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Glossary of funding terms

Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less.

Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million.

Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round.

Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.)

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