Heading into 2026, Wall Street and private equity investors alike were riding a wave of high optimism at the prospect of a massive wave of new initial public offerings. The projected pipeline featured an unprecedented roster of mega-cap private technology giants, including aerospace pioneer SpaceX, artificial intelligence leader Anthropic, and generative AI front-runner OpenAI, all poised to transition from private funding rounds to the public equities market.
That initial exuberance, however, has cooled significantly. Investors are now forced to recalibrate their expectations downward, settling for a much leaner public market debut landscape than anticipated at the start of the year. OpenAI definitively ruled out its much-anticipated public market debut in 2026, while a series of other highly anticipated offerings have faced cascading postponements over the course of the year.
On the prediction market platform Kalshi, speculators now believe that the single major private company left with a viable path to officially announce an IPO before the year closes is Anthropic. The artificial intelligence firm confidentially filed its S-1 prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission back in early June, setting the stage for what many hoped would be a historic market entry.
The prediction contracts on Kalshi allow traders to speculate on whether specific high-profile private companies will officially announce an initial public offering within the 2026 calendar year. For the purposes of these contracts, an official announcement is legally and procedurally defined by the SEC declaring a company’s S-1 registration statement effective, the actual pricing of an IPO, or a major public exchange assigning an official ticker symbol to the stock. Contract resolutions rely on verified reports from established news outlets as primary sources.
Of the 23 prominent private companies currently listed on Kalshi’s active trading market, Anthropic stands virtually alone. It is the only entity maintaining greater than a 50% probability—hovering at a 75% chance as of Monday morning—to officially announce an IPO before the conclusion of the year.
Other once-prominent candidates for public listings have seen their implied market probabilities plummet dramatically over the past ten months. Back in January, retail and institutional traders on prediction platforms gave financial technology infrastructure company Plaid solid 50% odds of making its public market debut over the course of the year. Sentiment has since cratered, with traders now pricing in just a 10% chance that the company, which was reportedly valued at $8 billion in its most recent private funding round, will successfully navigate an IPO in 2026.
A similarly dramatic shift has occurred regarding global human resources and payroll platform Deel. The HR unicorn held even 50-50 odds as recently as February, but current speculators see a mere 3% probability that the company will go public before the calendar turns. Cloud and artificial intelligence platform Databricks has experienced an equally steep decline, with its market odds collapsing to just 1% after opening the year with more than 50% odds among investors.
OpenAI, serving as Anthropic’s primary rival in the fierce generative AI landscape, faces a similarly bleak outlook for a near-term public offering. Kalshi traders currently assign OpenAI a meager 3% probability of executing an IPO this year. This sharp retreat follows comments made last month by CEO Sam Altman, who indicated that pursuing a public debut did not make strategic sense at this juncture amid growing industry concerns over AI safety governance and long-term structural scaling. Currently, Kalshi traders place only 50-50 odds on OpenAI making any official IPO announcement prior to June 2027.
Growing Postponements and Market Realities
The broader trend of IPO postponements across various technology and financial sectors has accelerated notably in recent weeks. While overall IPO proceeds for the year remain up sharply—bolstered primarily by a handful of mega-cap debuts, most notably SpaceX’s high-profile entry in June—the actual volume of U.S. initial public offerings priced this year is down a staggering 33% compared to the same period in 2025, according to data from Renaissance Capital.
Institutional investors have heavily bet on major artificial intelligence companies, along with infrastructure providers whose hardware and software products directly contribute to the ongoing global AI build-out, to make the leap from private financing to public markets. These firms have historically sought access to vastly larger pools of institutional and retail capital to finance their capital-intensive research and development cycles. Having grown at a blistering, unprecedented pace over the past several years, public equities were widely viewed by market observers as the logical next institutional step to support their continued corporate expansion.
Those optimistic growth assumptions, however, were abruptly called into question when Anthropic revealed its financial metrics. The company reported that its total revenue reached $16.8 billion in the third quarter, signaling a noticeable deceleration in quarter-over-quarter growth compared to the hyper-growth phases witnessed in previous periods.
The disclosure immediately triggered intense scrutiny from market analysts attempting to parse the long-term economic viability of the current AI boom.
"More questions than answers emerged around the reasons for revenue growth deceleration in September and whether Anthropic can grow revenue at the rate the market is expecting given dynamics such as [large language model] pricing pressure," wrote 22V Research analyst Dauvin Peterson in a note to clients. "At the end of the day, the revised IPO valuation range starting at $1.5T vs the prior expectation of at least $2T was viewed as disappointing and added fuel to the fire for the AI-related equities that were already under pressure."
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