Bankers have been betting on an IPO boom in 2026, with mega-debuts such as Anthropic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX expected to hit the public markets.
NYSE Group Inc. President Lynn Martin expects “tremendous” activity for initial public offerings in the coming weeks, in a widely anticipated comeback after a muted period for IPOs in the past few years.
“We have a deal on the road at the moment, we have another deal going next week,” Martin said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos on Wednesday. “We really see it towards the back end of Q1 into Q2,” with many firms targeting public market debuts then.
IPO activity has declined in recent years as companies tend to remain private longer, driven by the availability of private capital and the added regulations that come with being a public firm. Higher interest rates have also weighed on the IPO pipeline since 2022.
“The private markets have done a good job in financing these companies and enabling these companies to continue to build, to innovate, to refine their strategy,” said Martin, who leads the world’s largest stock market. “But there isn’t a substitute for the public markets for the long term.”
Bankers have been betting on an IPO boom in 2026, with mega-debuts such as Anthropic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX expected to hit the public markets. The latter is seeking a valuation of about $1.5 trillion.
Martin said last month that the rising cost of public market disclosures, combined with what she described as the outsize role of proxy advisers, has made companies hesitant to go public. But now, the IPO market is broadly open across sectors, Martin said in an interview with Bloomberg TV in August, arguing that companies coming to market after longer waits tend to be stronger and better prepared.
NYSE said earlier this week that it’s building a venue using blockchain technology to allow for trading tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds around the clock.
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