SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic could reopen the IPO market—or drain it

SpaceX’s confidential IPO filing has Wall Street abuzz about a reopening for high-growth tech debuts, with OpenAI and Anthropic also looming in the wings. Despite the hype, the IPO market that awaits them looks nothing like 2021’s stampede.

In Q1 2026, private markets went into overdrive while the exit window stayed selective. New Crunchbase data shows investors poured about $300 billion into roughly 6,000 startups globally in the quarter, up more than 150% both quarter over quarter and year over year. According to the report, it was the biggest quarter for venture on record. 

“AI is driving this whole venture investment cycle. So it’s completely dominated,” Gené Teare, research lead at Crunchbase, told Fortune. She noted that around 50% of global capital went to AI in 2025. That share jumped to about 80% in Q1 2026, powered by giant financings for OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI.

Q1’s capital was heavily skewed to the top of the stack. Late-stage funding more than tripled year over year—reaching $246.6 billion across 584 deals in Q1—with $235 billion funneled into just 158 rounds of $100 million or more. The Crunchbase Unicorn Board now includes roughly 1,700 companies. But, according to Teare, only around 40 of those have raised new funding or valuations since the beginning of 2024, leaving about 60% still priced off an earlier cycle. Teare said the market is “between two worlds”: highly valued SaaS-era unicorns that look ready on revenue but can’t convincingly prove AI-driven growth, and “new native AI companies” posting huge early numbers but still too early and volatile for the public markets.

The backdrop for this standoff is the whiplash from the 2021 IPO boom when global IPO proceeds surpassed $600 billion across roughly 2,600 to 3,000 deals. From 2022 through 2024, however, IPO activity slowed significantly. The market began to stabilize in 2025: Global IPOs totaled 1,293 deals raising about $171.8 billion, a 39% increase in proceeds year over year, and the pipeline for 2026 turned more optimistic as larger tech names like Chime and Klarna finally got out. 

Coming into this year, Teare said that many bankers and issuers were betting on a more durable reopening—until the SaaSpocalypse. With some prospective offerings pulled or delayed, early 2026 was “much slower than was expected” even as overall U.S. IPO proceeds and deal counts improved from deeply depressed 2024 levels.

All of that leaves SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic in a category of their own. OpenAI now tops Crunchbase’s unicorn board, SpaceX is No. 2, and Anthropic is in fourth place. “There’s going to be a huge appetite for these companies should they list,” Teare said, adding that in past cycles, “when large companies go out, that creates a lot of energy in the markets for other companies to also go out.” 

The catch this time is that the trio is “so huge, and they’re very much outliers,” raising the question of whether their eventual IPOs will jumpstart a broader backlog of SaaS and AI names—or simply “suck a lot of the money and energy out of the room” while everyone else keeps waiting.

See you tomorrow,

Lily Mae Lazarus
X: @LilyMaeLazarus
Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com