The IPO Market Is Reopening in 2026, But Only for a Very Specific Kind of CompanyPublished: July 27, 2026 | Category: Investment | By Mahesh
Every year since 2022 has carried some version of the same headline: the IPO market is finally reopening. Most of those years disappointed. 2026 appears to be the year the claim is actually holding up, though not in the way most founders and investors assumed it would. US IPO market activity increased in 2025, delivering approximately $44 billion in proceeds, a stronger reopening on volume than most forecasts predicted a year earlier, and Goldman Sachs now estimates roughly $160 billion in US IPO gross proceeds for 2026, a figure that would rank among the largest annual totals on record excluding SPAC-driven years.[2] There have already been 88 IPOs in 2026 through the first half of the year, with June alone producing 19, the busiest single month so far, and PwC's Q2 2026 Capital Markets Watch names the quarter's defining event as a record-breaking IPO from SpaceX.[3] This piece works through what is actually driving the reopening, why it remains so narrow despite the strong headline numbers, what sector and company profile is winning versus stuck on the sidelines, and what it means heading into the second half of 2026 as OpenAI and Anthropic both sit in the confidential filing pipeline.
The Reopening Is Real, But It Is Extremely Selective
Deloitte's review of the 2025 to 2026 window frames the honest state of the market precisely: the year delivered more activity, more confidence and a clearer sense of what the market is and is not willing to reward, but importantly, the reopening has been uneven.[4] That unevenness is not a minor caveat, it is the central story. PitchBook data cited by Foley and Lardner's 2026 outlook found that companies going public in 2025 were heavily concentrated in sectors prioritised by current policy, including AI, space technology, crypto, fintech and defence, and excluding healthcare and life sciences, 73.1 percent of all 2025 IPOs occurred within exactly those sectors.[5] Investors gravitated specifically toward established, enterprise-focused businesses with durable revenue models and a credible, near-term path to profitability, a marked departure from the anything-goes mindset that characterised the 2020 to 2021 cycle, when growth alone was often sufficient justification for a public listing regardless of the underlying unit economics.[4]
The sectors left out of this reopening are just as telling as the ones included. General Atlantic's mid-2026 analysis notes that consumer discretionary, software as a service and healthcare services have either performed poorly or seen relatively limited IPO activity so far this year, a genuinely uncomfortable finding for the broader software industry given how central SaaS companies were to the prior IPO cycle.[1] Deloitte's research confirms the same pattern from a different angle: many issuers, particularly in software and SaaS specifically, chose to remain private throughout 2025 rather than test a public market that was rewarding AI infrastructure and mission-critical software but showing far less appetite for conventional subscription software businesses without a clear AI narrative attached.[4]
Why a Valuation Reset Had to Happen Before Any of This Was Possible
One of the less-discussed mechanics behind the 2026 reopening is that it required companies to genuinely let go of pandemic-era valuation expectations rather than waiting for the market to eventually grow back into them. Foley and Lardner's analysis is direct about this: the 2025 market benefited from a widespread valuation reset, with down-round IPOs, companies going public at a lower valuation than their last private funding round, allowing a genuine recalibration from 2021's peak pricing to what the market now treats as a more sustainable normal.[5] This matters enormously for any late-stage private company still holding onto a valuation set during the 2021 boom. The companies that successfully went public in 2025 and 2026 largely did so by accepting that their last private mark was not a floor to defend, but a peak-cycle number that needed correcting before public investors would engage seriously.
EY's Global IPO Leader Karim Anani captured the resulting investor posture precisely: activity in 2025 demonstrated a genuine return of confidence in global IPO markets, marked by a selective and fast-moving environment where investors favoured scale, clarity and resilience over growth-at-any-cost narratives.[6] That combination, selectivity plus speed, is a meaningfully different market character than either the frozen IPO window of 2022 to 2023 or the anything-goes enthusiasm of 2021, and it is the reason so many companies that could technically go public in 2026 are choosing to wait for stronger, more specific proof points before testing the window.
Equity Markets Are Doing More Than Just IPOs Right Now
Morgan Stanley's research adds an important piece of context that pure IPO headline numbers miss entirely: the IPO reopening is occurring alongside continued strength across other forms of equity capital raising, not instead of them. Global equity capital markets issuance totalled approximately $957 billion in 2025, with follow-on offerings raising roughly $200 billion and convertible issuance reaching around $166 billion, together accounting for more than a third of all equity capital raised even as IPO activity itself recovered.[7] This tells a more complete story than the IPO figures alone: companies and investors are using increasingly flexible funding strategies, choosing between an IPO, a follow-on offering from an already-public company, or convertible debt depending on which instrument fits their specific capital need and risk appetite at a given moment, rather than treating an IPO as the singular, binary event it was often framed as in prior cycles.
EY's Q2 2026 Global IPO Trends report reinforces this same flexibility trend from the issuer side, finding that companies pursuing public listings are increasingly using a mix of approaches, traditional IPOs, direct listings and SPACs, to capitalise on improving market conditions rather than defaulting to a single standard listing structure.[8] The presence of SPACs with unredeemed trusts and ample remaining time to transact, noted specifically in EY's US market commentary, is creating additional live opportunities for companies seeking a public listing route outside the traditional IPO process entirely.[6]
| Metric | 2025 | 2026 (projected or YTD) |
| US IPO proceeds | ~$44 billion | ~$160 billion (Goldman Sachs estimate) |
| Total US IPOs | 202 (26 in July, the peak month) | 88 through H1 (19 in June, the peak month) |
| Global equity capital markets issuance | ~$957 billion (all instruments) | Tracking similarly strong per Morgan Stanley |
| Dominant sectors (ex-healthcare) | 73.1% in AI, space, crypto, fintech, defence | Same sectors expected to continue leading |
The OpenAI and Anthropic Question Looming Over the Second Half of 2026
PwC's Q2 2026 Capital Markets Watch flags the single development most likely to define the remainder of the year: both OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the most highly valued AI companies in the world, confidentially filed for public offerings during the quarter.[3] LPL Research's tracking adds important context to OpenAI's specific situation: on March 31, 2026, the company announced a record $122 billion funding round at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, and on June 8 confirmed it had confidentially submitted a draft S-1 filing with the SEC.[9] If market conditions remain supportive through the back half of the year, PwC's analysis suggests these transactions would likely rank among the largest technology IPOs in history and could represent an outsized share of total 2026 issuance on their own.
Why does this matter beyond the scale of the deals themselves? PwC's own framing is precise: the eventual performance of these listings will likely serve as an important barometer for investor appetite toward large-scale growth companies, and could meaningfully influence the pace of broader venture-backed IPO activity that follows.[3] This is the same dynamic we examined in our earlier look at whether the current AI funding surge represents a genuine boom or dangerous concentration, and the IPO market is now where that underlying question gets its clearest public test. A strong OpenAI or Anthropic aftermarket performance would likely widen the reopening considerably, pulling more companies and sectors into a confident public market. A disappointing debut from either company would just as plausibly narrow the window back down, reinforcing the market's current preference for extreme selectivity over broad participation.
What This Means for Founders and Investors Positioning for the Rest of 2026
For founders at late-stage private companies, the practical read is that the IPO window has genuinely reopened, but readiness now means something considerably more specific than it did in 2021. EY's Global IPO Leader put it plainly: companies that prioritise IPO readiness and act with agility will be positioned to seize opportunities as they arise, language that reflects a market moving quickly for the right company and remaining firmly closed for anything short of that.[6] Concretely, this means demonstrating durable revenue and a credible, near-term path to profitability rather than growth alone, being prepared to accept a valuation grounded in current public market comparables rather than a defended 2021-era private mark, and building a scale story, given General Atlantic's data pointing toward $750 million-plus offerings increasingly leading the market over smaller deals.[1]
The valuation-reset dynamic deserves particular attention from any founder who raised a large private round during the 2021 peak and has been holding onto that mark ever since. The companies that successfully tested the public market in 2025 and early 2026 largely did so by treating their last private valuation as a historical data point rather than a floor worth defending at all costs, and Foley and Lardner's research on widespread down-round IPOs suggests boards and management teams that resist this recalibration are simply choosing to stay private for longer, not avoiding the correction itself. A founder weighing an IPO in the second half of 2026 should be running the comparable-company analysis against current public market multiples in their sector today, not against whatever valuation a venture round commanded three or four years ago, since that is precisely the gap public market investors are now pricing in before they will engage.
For investors, the sector concentration data is the most actionable signal available right now. With 73.1 percent of non-healthcare 2025 IPO activity concentrated in AI, space technology, crypto, fintech and defence, and SaaS and consumer discretionary companies still largely sitting on the sidelines, the reopening is best understood as sector-specific rather than market-wide. Treating this as a broad-based recovery risks missing exactly the concentration dynamic that made both this year's IPO gains and the underlying AI funding boom we've covered so narrow in the first place, and the OpenAI and Anthropic listings later this year are likely to be the clearest single test of whether that concentration finally starts to broaden into the wider market.
There is also a portfolio construction lesson embedded in the equity capital markets data Morgan Stanley highlighted. With follow-on offerings and convertible issuance together accounting for more than a third of all equity capital raised in 2025, investors focused purely on tracking new IPO listings are seeing an incomplete picture of where capital is actually moving. A meaningful share of the same growth-stage liquidity story is playing out through secondary and convertible instruments issued by companies that are already public, meaning the IPO reopening headline understates the total scale of capital markets activity currently supporting technology and AI-adjacent growth companies. For investors building exposure to this cycle, tracking follow-on and convertible activity alongside the primary IPO pipeline gives a more complete read on where institutional capital is actually flowing, rather than waiting solely for the next headline-grabbing debut.
Common Questions
Sources
- General Atlantic. The 2026 IPO Comeback Takes Shape. June 23, 2026. generalatlantic.com
- LPL Financial Research. Introducing the IPO Class of 2026 and the Market Impacts, citing Goldman Sachs estimates. June 15, 2026. lpl.com
- PwC. US Capital Markets Watch, Q2 2026. pwc.com
- Deloitte. The IPO Market Reopens: Lessons From 2025 and Expectations for 2026. February 23, 2026. deloitte.com
- Foley and Lardner. 2026 IPO Market Outlook: Momentum, Deregulation and the Path to Liquidity, citing PitchBook data. March 2, 2026. foley.com
- EY. US IPO Market Trends. ey.com
- Morgan Stanley. A Larger, Broader IPO Market Takes Shape in 2026. May 27, 2026. morganstanley.com
- EY. Global IPO Trends, Q2 2026. ey.com
- LPL Financial Research. Introducing the IPO Class of 2026, OpenAI funding and S-1 filing details. June 15, 2026. lpl.com