Analysis
Four US IPOs priced this week, but the split between winners and losers says more about investor selectivity than overall risk appetite.
- Strive -- $630M preferred offering.
- City Therapeutics -- $200M upsized IPO.
- Iambic Therapeutics -- popped 18.19% on its debut.
- Amaero -- raised $20M at $4.25/share, roughly 40% below its original $7.06 target price (the deal size was cut ~62%, from $53M to $20M).
“- Amaero -- raised $20M at $4.25/share, roughly 40% below its original $7.06 target price (the deal size was cut ~62%, from $53M to $20M).”
Strive and City Therapeutics alone combined for $830 million in fresh proceeds. Pulse covered the four-pricing stretch in detail, and Value Add Pulse's funding tracker keeps the running IPO total; the combined-proceeds math here is new.
On October 9, the previous week, Firmus Grid withdrew its IPO at a roughly $30 billion valuation after investors balked -- even though the data-center builder had delivered only 46 megawatts of a 912-megawatt pipeline it was pricing against. Put the two data points together and the pattern isn't "IPO window open" or "IPO window shut." It's that the market is pricing smaller, data-backed biotech and preferred-stock deals on their fundamentals while refusing to extend neocloud infrastructure builders credit for capacity they haven't built yet.
That's a meaningfully different signal for founders deciding when to file than either headline alone would suggest: a $200 million biotech offering with real trial data clears easily, while a $30 billion infrastructure story built on a 5% delivery rate gets pulled rather than repriced down. The gap between those two outcomes is the test any 2026 IPO candidate should run against its own numbers before filing.
