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| The Daily Pitch |
| PE, VC and M&A |
| Your edge on global private capital markets |
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| Good morning. Today's Daily Pitch takes a deep dive into the IPO market's prospects for 2026. Read below, and download our latest research here. Also, we take stock of the secondaries market, analyzing new data from three intermediaries. |
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| Our new weekly newsletter, Public Meets Private, covers the intersection of alternatives and the wealth channel. Sign up here |
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| Reopening the IPO window isn't the same as widening it |
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By Emily Zheng, Senior Venture Capital Analyst
This year's IPO activity is shaping up to be quite similar to 2025's, during which exit value was highly concentrated in companies benefiting from US policy priorities like AI, crypto, fintech, defense tech and space tech, according to our latest analyst note.
This would keep VCs in a pickle as they continue to face mounting pressure to deliver liquidity to their investors after four consecutive years of negative cash flow.
There were only 48 IPOs of US venture-backed companies last year—barely an increase since the market turned in 2022.
Last year's tailwinds and limitations will continue to define 2026. On one hand, valuation compression has lowered the bar to going public, clearing a path that had been blocked by pandemic-era pricing.
On the other, post-IPO performance in 2025 was underwhelming, especially for high-growth companies that debuted with large price jumps but ended the year with significantly lower stock prices. |
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However, what makes 2026 stand out from previous post-pandemic years is that some of venture's most valuable companies are said to be planning to go public, including SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. This is a notable departure from recent years when their ability to raise huge sums of private capital seemed unlimited. Now, in capital-intensive, highly competitive sectors like AI and space technology, the scale of investment required to beat competitors has made the public markets essential.
And this creates a new challenge. Many of these companies are enormous. If several pursue IPOs around the same time, public market capacity and investor appetite could become limiting factors. Even if the top companies do provide liquidity, that doesn't automatically translate into broader access for the rest of the venture market.
The result is a market that is only partially open. Even under favorable conditions, a gradual recovery is more likely than a flood of listings, especially if 2026 has multiple macroeconomic surprises like 2025. Expect IPO activity to improve incrementally this year, not dramatically. |
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• PitchBook Benchmarks provide a snapshot of data for closed-end fund returns across strategies and vintage years. The latest edition has returns through Q2 2025, with preliminary data through Q3. Get it now
• The UK's private markets ended 2025 on firmer footing, as the IPO pipeline revived and PE mega-deals surged. Read the report
• French PE activity weakened sharply toward the end of last year, with Q4 marking the slowest quarter for dealmaking since 2020, even as conditions stabilized elsewhere in Europe. Read more |
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| The secondary market's capitalization conundrum |
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By Rod James, Senior Private Equity Editor
Twice a year, some of the largest intermediaries in the secondary market publish data, based on a survey of buyers, outlining the volume of trade in fund stakes.
That 2025 was a record year is beyond dispute. Yesterday, secondary market intermediaries Jefferies, PJT Partners and Campbell Lutyens all published data putting total transaction volumes for 2025 at between $225 billion and $240 billion. This compares with consensus estimates for 2024 of around $160 billion, which itself was a record year.
Evercore, the largest intermediary of secondary deals, published its findings earlier this month.
Activity has largely been driven by a lackluster market for M&A and IPOs, which has reduced the flow of distributions that limited partners receive from their private equity portfolios, prompting them to sell assets to generate liquidity.
A chart published by Jefferies suggests that, despite the market's rapid growth on both supply and demand, it remains strangely undercapitalized. Whether this can be remedied in 2026 is an open question. |
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The secondary market has long been dominated by a handful of buyers, some of whose funds targeting institutional investors rank among the largest PE vehicles ever. Ardian, Lexington Partners and Blackstone Strategic Partners all broke the $20 billion barrier with their latest flagship secondaries funds.
New entrants are chipping away at this hegemony, according to Jefferies. It found that the 10 largest secondary buyers accounted for 51% of total capital deployment in 2025, marking the second straight year of decline and a 14 percentage point drop compared with four years ago. |
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Smart reads that caught our eye.
• A research paper suggests AI agents are mathematically doomed to fail. The industry doesn’t agree. [Wired]
• JP Morgan has told its investment bankers they need to close the gap with Goldman and other rivals on mergers and acquisitions. [Bloomberg]
• The trade deal between the EU and India represents a "transformational" landmark that eliminates up to €4 billion in tariffs on European exports to the Asian giant. [Financial Times] |
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| Since yesterday, the PitchBook Platform added: |
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1035
Deals
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2771
People
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1033
Companies
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23
Funds
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