Analysis
The two largest tech listings on the 2026 calendar have each quietly slipped their timelines. Pulse previously reported that Anthropic's public S-1 filing has moved to late September and its investor roadshow to mid-October at the earliest, with the actual Nasdaq listing now targeted for October -- later than the September window discussed earlier this summer. Oura, the smart-ring maker, filed its S-1 on September 3 seeking up to $3 billion at a valuation above $16 billion, but as of this week has set no price range, share count, or listing date.
Two Very Different Scales, One Shared Bottleneck
Anthropic's offering would be one of the largest tech IPOs ever -- a $965B valuation with expected proceeds north of $60B, led by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley, with Wilson Sonsini as legal counsel.
“- Revenue growth -- from $500M in 2024 to a projected $1.5B in 2026.”
Oura's raise is two orders of magnitude smaller in dollar terms but no less dramatic in trajectory:
- Target valuation -- above $16B, up from $10.9B in its last private round.
- Revenue growth -- from $500M in 2024 to a projected $1.5B in 2026.
- Last private round -- an $875M Series E backed by Fidelity, ICONIQ, Whale Rock, and Atreides.
- Underwriters -- Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Allen & Co., and Jefferies.
The overlap matters more than the size gap: Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan all appear on both syndicates. Investment banks running IPO roadshows have finite senior-banker and institutional-investor bandwidth, and sequencing two enormous offerings back-to-back on the same underwriting desks is a real constraint, independent of either company's fundamentals.
What The Slips Actually Signal
Neither company has withdrawn or repriced downward -- both delays are process slippage, not demand collapse. Pulse has tracked Oura's IPO story through several stages already, from its confidential filing in May to this month's public S-1, and the throughline across that coverage is a company still scaling its numbers upward even as the calendar keeps moving. Anthropic's delay reads similarly: a company managing an unprecedented raise size against market-window timing, not a company struggling to justify its valuation.
What the headline delays miss: 2026's broader IPO market is having its strongest year since 2021, with 331 filings and 280 completions through early September and only 10 withdrawals all year. Two mega-deals moving from September to October is a rounding error against that backdrop -- unless it happens a second time. If either roadshow slips again past its new target, that would be the first real crack in an otherwise resilient IPO year, and worth treating as a market signal rather than company-specific noise.
