Why 2026 is the year of the mega-IPO

It’s been a while since a company with a ton of hype — think Facebook or Uber — has offered its shares for the first time on public stock exchanges.

But that could change soon. Three big tech firms are all eyeing initial public offerings in 2026.

There’s SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led company that launches rockets and runs satellites and now owns Musk’s artificial intelligence firm. There’s Anthropic, the company behind the AI platform Claude. And there’s OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

All three have already raised billions from private investors, but they’re all aiming to raise even more on public markets. Why?

Investors have generally been a bit more risk-averse this year, which is not a great sign for companies looking to go public.

But investors are still interested in certain IPOs, said Avery Marquez at Renaissance Capital.

“You either have to be in the right industry or you have to be the right name,” Marquez said.

SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic each check those boxes. They’re huge names, and they’re all involved in an industry that investors are still pretty bullish about: artificial intelligence.

“These are the first, really recognizable, big name AI companies coming to market,” Marquez said.

And everyday investors want a piece of them.

These big companies need more money even after raising billions from venture capital and other private investors, said Sarah Kunst at Cleo Capital.

“To some extent, they’ve sort of knocked on every door in private capital, it’s kind of time for them to move on to a different source of capital,” Kunst said.

And the next place to find it is in the public market.

Plus, those private investors in these tech giants are itching to cash in some of their shares which have risen in value, said Kyle Stanford at PitchBook.

That’s harder to do if shares in a company aren’t publicly traded.

“They’re used to being able to get in and get out when they need. And so at some point, those are the investors that really need to get that liquidity,” Stanford said.

One more factor: interest rates. Steven Blitz at GlobalData T-S Lombard expects them to rise in the next year.

“This is probably one of the cheaper moments in which to do an IPO, versus a year from now,” Blitz said, when there will still likely be demand for these mega-IPO’s.

It just might be more expensive for companies to get all their ducks in a row.