Going Public Stopped Being the Finish Line

Every year since the Fed started hiking in 2022, someone in venture has predicted the IPO window is about to reopen. Every year, it hasn’t — or hasn’t in the way we expected. A sharp new PitchBook analyst note from Kyle Stanford and Emily Zheng makes the case that we’ve been asking the wrong question. The issue was never when the window reopens. It’s that the window has been permanently resized, and most of us haven’t recalibrated.

The framing in the title is the whole argument: IPOs aren’t dead. They’re demoted — from the default financing and liquidity event for a scaled venture company to one option among several, reserved for companies with a specific reason to use it. That’s a structural change, not a cyclical one, and it has real implications for how we think about portfolio construction, DPI expectations, and what “exit” even means going forward.

43–50VC-backed IPOs per year since 2022, vs. a 70/yr, 15-year average64,000+VC-backed companies in the backlog — the highest on record>60%shortfall vs. PitchBook’s Exit Predictor model, 2022 & 2024

The math doesn’t work the way it used to

Here’s what stopped me: 2025 was one of the two strongest years on record for US equities, with the S&P 500 setting more than 35 new all-time highs. By any historical playbook, that backdrop should have triggered a wave of new listings. Instead, completed IPOs have lagged PitchBook’s own Exit Predictor model by more than 60% in both 2022 and 2024. VC-backed IPOs have averaged 70 a year over the past 15 years; since the pandemic, we’ve been running at 43 to 50. That gap has compounded into a backlog of more than 64,000 VC-backed companies sitting in portfolios — the highest figure in PitchBook’s dataset.

Nasdaq 100 & S&P 500 (rebased to 100) vs. VC IPO count, 2016–2026. Strong public markets and a shrinking IPO count have moved in opposite directions since 2022.Source: PitchBookVC-backed IPO exit value ($B) and count, 2016–2026. Counts have been stuck in the 43–50 range since 2022, versus 92–201 a year from 2019–2021.Source: PitchBook

Strong public markets used to pull companies out. Now they don’t, because the reasons a company needed to go public have largely disappeared. Before the late 2010s, a company scaling past $50–100 million in revenue had run out of private capital and had to tap the public markets for growth funding. That’s no longer true. VC fund sizes and dry powder have grown enormous, private credit is now routinely available even to non-unicorns, and multibillion-dollar late-stage rounds are unremarkable. On top of that, the secondary market has matured into a real release valve — early employees and investors can sell a slice of their position ahead of any liquidity event, and new products (Robinhood’s private-market fund, Goldman’s expanded direct-exposure offerings) are pulling in capital that never used to have a path into private companies at all.

Why founders still care about going public — just not for the reason you’d think

The report’s most useful section, for me, is the one asking what IPOs still uniquely provide, now that they’re no longer the primary funding mechanism. The answer isn’t “nothing” — it’s a shorter, more specific list. Secondary markets are a good pressure valve but not a complete one: most startups cap how much stock employees and investors can sell across all tender offers, often around a quarter of total equity, so the gap between liquidity needs and available distributions keeps widening the longer a company stays private. A public listing also produces something secondaries can’t fake — an externally discovered, continuously priced valuation, rather than one administered by the company and its board. That matters enormously for large stock-for-stock M&A, where both sides need a shared, verifiable basis for the deal. It also unlocks passive and mandate-constrained institutional capital that can’t touch VC at all, and it buys the kind of counterparty trust that banks, insurers, and government contractors specifically require.

In other words: companies aren’t going public because they’re out of money. They’re going public because they’ve hit a specific structural need — usually liquidity at scale, an M&A currency, or access to a pool of capital that only exists on the other side of a listing.

The pricing gap is the real obstacle

Even for companies that want to list, the math is ugly right now, and this is where the report’s numbers are genuinely startling. Median Series D+ pre-money valuations went from $137 million in 2016 to $955 million in 2021 to more than $2 billion through the first half of 2026. Private companies raising $100 million-plus rounds this year have seen valuations grow at a median annualized rate of 140.7% — second only to 2021’s mania.

Top-quartile VC pre-money valuation ($M) by series, 2016–2026. Series D+ pricing has roughly doubled since 2025, decoupling further from what public markets will pay.Source: PitchBook

Public markets aren’t playing along. The median SaaS Capital Index ARR multiple has fallen from a 2021 peak near 17x to roughly 4x today. During the pandemic, crossover funds already sitting on cap tables pushed IPO-day multiples even higher than offer-price multiples — 20.3x EV/revenue at offer in 2021, rising to 26.6x by first close. That dynamic has completely flipped: public markets used to amplify private exuberance, and now they correct it. Chime is the case study everyone in venture already knows: it went public at a 63.4% markdown to its private-market peak. For the cohort that last raised in 2021–2022, PitchBook estimates an average valuation decline of more than 50% from the previous round.

Median SaaS Capital Index ARR multiple, 2016–2026. Public SaaS multiples round-tripped from ~6x pre-pandemic, to a ~17x peak in 2021, back to ~4x today.Source: SaaS Capital, via PitchBook

And the dispersion in what happens after the IPO is brutal and instructive. As of PitchBook’s writing, Gemini Space Station is down 86% from its IPO price, BitGo down 68%, Firefly Aerospace down 40.7%, Figma down 23% (after a 250% first-day pop, which tells you everything about how disconnected day-one pricing can be from fundamentals). On the other side: SpaceX up 3.7%, Cerebras up 18.4%, Chime up 18.6%, Voyager up 38.6%, Circle up 131%, CoreWeave up 163.2%. That’s not noise — it’s public markets doing exactly what they’re supposed to do, forcing companies to defend a growth story with quarterly financials instead of a pitch deck.

Post-IPO performance of select listings relative to IPO price, as of August 14, 2026. The spread between the best and worst performer here is nearly 250 points.Source: PitchBook

What actually happens next

PitchBook still expects roughly 76 VC-backed IPOs in 2026 — a real improvement over the post-pandemic trough — but most of that lift is coming from biotech, pharma, and healthcare, which use the public markets differently than the rest of venture does. The tech-IPO story for the rest of the year is really a two-name story: how the market receives the anticipated Anthropic and OpenAI listings. A strong reception would do more than generate overdue distributions — it would effectively validate the AI-driven private valuations that have built up across the ecosystem, where roughly 30% of unicorns are now AI-native or AI-adjacent. A weak one, given that Alibaba, Meta, Uber, and Figma all traded down in their first year as public companies, would force a much harder reassessment of what those private marks are actually worth.

“This is not a temporary setback… the IPO window will stay narrow by design, not by accident.”

Why this matters if you’re writing checks

If you’re underwriting deals or reporting to LPs, the practical takeaway isn’t “wait for the window.” It’s that the window, as we knew it, isn’t coming back in its old form. The report’s framing — companies will spend longer private, be bigger at listing, and go public for a specific catalyst rather than out of necessity — should already be baked into how we model hold periods and DPI curves. Average VC DPI in the first ten years of a fund’s life has been lagging historical vintages for a reason, and it’s not just the 2022 slowdown; it’s that the exit mechanism the entire model was built around has changed its function. Secondaries, tender offers, and continuation vehicles aren’t stopgaps anymore — they’re becoming core portfolio-management tools, not workarounds while everyone waits for a “normal” IPO market to return.

The companies that do go public from here will look different: further along, better financially disciplined, and IPO-ing for a reason you can actually point to. That’s a smaller, higher-bar cohort — and it’s worth updating our expectations, and our LPs’ expectations, accordingly.

Data in this post are drawn from PitchBook's August 28, 2026 Institutional Research Group analyst note, "IPOs Are Not Dead but Demoted," by Kyle Stanford, CAIA, and Emily Zheng.