Heading into 2026, global financial markets were electric with anticipation, fueled by widespread expectations of a historic wave of initial public offerings. Investors and analysts alike predicted that a lucrative roster of mega-cap private companies—including commercial space giant SpaceX, alongside prominent artificial intelligence developers Anthropic and OpenAI—would finally transition from private funding rounds to the public exchanges. Wall Street anticipated that these tech titans would inject massive momentum into the primary equity markets, revitalizing an IPO landscape that had experienced years of sluggish activity.
Instead, reality has fallen far short of those high-flying January expectations. Investors are now forced to settle for a drastically scaled-back debut schedule as macro headwinds, strategic shifts, and cooling market sentiment catch up to the venture-backed economy. Highlighting this abrupt reversal, OpenAI definitively ruled out any possibility of launching its public debut in 2026, joining several other prominent startups that quietly hit the brakes on their listing timelines as the year progressed.
On the prediction market platform Kalshi, speculators now believe that Anthropic stands virtually alone as the final major enterprise positioned to officially announce an IPO before the calendar turns. Anthropic took a critical step forward back in early June, when it confidentially filed an S-1 registration prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission, setting the stage for what many hoped would be a watershed moment for the artificial intelligence sector.
The prediction contracts hosted on Kalshi allow traders to wager on whether specific high-profile private companies will officially announce an IPO during the 2026 calendar year. For the purposes of these contracts, an official announcement is defined by concrete regulatory or market milestones: the SEC declaring a company’s S-1 prospectus effective, the formal pricing of an initial public offering, or a major stock exchange assigning a trading ticker symbol to the security. Resolution of these dynamic contracts relies on verified reporting from trusted financial news outlets and regulatory filings.
Of the 23 companies currently listed on Kalshi’s active IPO market, Anthropic is the solitary name commanding greater than 50% odds from speculators. As of Monday morning, traders priced Anthropic at a 75% probability to officially announce its public market debut before the year concludes.
For nearly every other marquee name that captured investor imagination at the start of the year, however, expectations have plummeted into single digits.
Financial technology firm Plaid entered January with traders assigning it a solid 50% probability of going public in 2026. Those odds have since collapsed to just 10%, even though the company was reportedly valued at a robust $8 billion during its most recent private funding round earlier in the year.
A similar story has unfolded for Deel, a global human resources and payroll platform that had enjoyed even odds as recently as February. Today, speculators see only a meager 3% chance that Deel completes an IPO before 2027. Databricks, a leading cloud and artificial intelligence platform that commands a staggering private valuation of $190 billion following a major funding round in August, has suffered an identical fate. After starting the year with more than 50% odds among Kalshi traders, Databricks now sits at a paltry 1% probability for a 2026 public market arrival.
Meanwhile, OpenAI—Anthropic’s chief rival in the fiercely competitive generative artificial intelligence space—holds just a 3% probability of executing an IPO this year. That dramatic markdown follows remarks made by CEO Sam Altman last month, in which he asserted that a public listing simply did not make sense for the company at this juncture, citing ongoing strategic and safety concerns unique to the rapid scaling of advanced AI. Kalshi traders currently place even-money, 50-50 odds on whether OpenAI will make an official IPO announcement by June 2027.
Growing Postponements and Sector Realities
The widespread retrenchment among top-tier startups reflects a broader, industry-wide acceleration of IPO postponements spanning multiple sectors over recent quarters. Paradoxically, total U.S. IPO proceeds for the year remain up sharply, but that headline figure is heavily skewed by a handful of mega-cap debuts—most notably SpaceX, which celebrated its high-profile public offering with a digital billboard campaign in Times Square on June 12. Beneath the surface of those outsized proceeds, the underlying transaction volume tells a different story: the total number of U.S. IPOs priced this year is actually down 33% compared to the same period in 2025, according to data from Renaissance Capital.
Throughout the year, investors have heavily bet that major AI companies, alongside the hardware and software providers powering the broader AI infrastructure build-out, would inevitably be forced to tap public markets. The reasoning was straightforward: the staggering capital expenditures required to train and deploy frontier artificial intelligence models demand liquidity pools far larger than even the most well-funded private venture syndicates can sustainably provide. Having grown at a blistering, unprecedented pace, many of these firms view the public markets as the natural next evolutionary step to fund their long-term expansion.
Those optimistic growth assumptions, however, were called into serious question when Anthropic revealed its financial metrics for the third quarter. The company reported that its revenue hit $16.8 billion, a figure that disappointed market observers by displaying weaker quarter-over-quarter growth velocity compared to its historical trajectories.
The revelation immediately triggered a reassessment among equity researchers regarding the sustainability of hyper-growth models in the artificial intelligence sector, particularly as competitive pressures mount.
"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 Dauvin Peterson, an analyst at 22V Research, in a note to clients. "At the end of the day, the revised IPO valuation range starting at $1.5 trillion vs the prior expectation of at least $2 trillion was viewed as disappointing and added fuel to the fire for the AI-related equities that were already under pressure."
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