Analysis
Checking Pulse's own tracking of the 2026 IPO pipeline against this week's news turns up a pipeline that's active but increasingly bifurcated by company type, not thin.
Anthropic's confidential IPO prospectus, reported by Reuters, targets a valuation above $2 trillion -- a reset from its $965 billion mark in May -- even as its losses widen:
- Target valuation -- above $2T, versus $965B in May. Reuters via CNBC
- 2025 net loss -- $42 billion, against revenue of roughly $4.6 billion.
- Comp: SpaceX's IPO -- priced at roughly $1.77 trillion in June, the largest IPO on record.
“- Comp: SpaceX's IPO -- priced at roughly $1.77 trillion in June, the largest IPO on record.”
That ask means Anthropic is explicitly trying to price itself above the current benchmark rather than at a discount to it.
Below the frontier-lab tier, London-based AI-infrastructure company Nscale is proceeding on a more conventional path: it filed for an IPO in September and expects to list on the NYSE under ticker NSCL around mid-October, a timeline that puts it on the market well before Anthropic's own listing, which isn't expected until closer to the midterm elections in November.
Meanwhile, not every big 2026 deal is headed toward a listing at all: Paramount and [Warner Bros. Discovery's](/pulse/company/warner-bros-discovery) roughly $110 billion merger into Skydance, expected to close October 6, combines two already-public companies into one, under David Ellison's Skydance, rather than sending either toward a fresh IPO of its own.
What this split misses if read as one trend: a $2 trillion ask from a company still losing tens of billions annually and a mid-single-digit-billion NYSE listing from an infrastructure company are not the same risk profile, and investors pricing Pulse's broader IPO coverage off Anthropic's number alone would be extrapolating from the riskiest, least-comparable data point in the set.