Analysis
Newcomer's weekly analysis, published July 17, poses the question hanging over every banker and issuer currently planning a listing: can 2026's red-hot IPO window survive SpaceX's post-listing stock collapse and a broader spike in market volatility? The piece frames the year's run of blockbuster AI-and-space-adjacent debuts -- SpaceX, Csquare's data-center listing, Standard Nuclear's fuel-supply-chain offering -- as having been priced on an assumption that 2025's AI-driven risk appetite would simply continue uninterrupted into the public markets.
That assumption is now being tested in real time. SpaceX has fallen roughly 60% from its post-IPO peak, back near its original offer price within six weeks of listing. Csquare debuted below its price range and opened down. Standard Nuclear needed a 58% size cut to get its offering done at all. Each data point individually has its own explanation, but Newcomer's framing treats them collectively as the first real stress test of a window that had, until this month, priced almost everything for perfection.
“SpaceX has fallen roughly 60% from its post-IPO peak, back near its original offer price within six weeks of listing.”
The stakes extend well beyond the companies that have already listed. OpenAI's confidential S-1, Anthropic's own reported IPO preparations -- disclosed indirectly through Menlo Ventures' recent 40%-plus IRR scoop tied to its Anthropic stake -- and a broader wave of AI-infrastructure companies are all still queued behind this year's early movers. How the next few prints trade will set the tone bankers use to price the entire remaining slate, the same dynamic that played out in 2021 when early SPAC and tech debuts trading down triggered a broader window closure that took the better part of two years to reopen.
The comparison to 2021-2022 is instructive but not exact: this year's IPO wave is anchored in AI infrastructure with genuine, if early, revenue growth at companies like SpaceX and Databricks, rather than the pre-revenue SPAC mania that characterized the prior cycle's excess. But the pattern -- hot window, early debuts stumble, subsequent issuers reprice down or pull altogether -- is one every banker currently marketing a 2026-2027 listing is now explicitly watching for.
The bear case: a handful of rocky debuts in a single asset class (space, data-center real estate, nuclear fuel) doesn't necessarily predict how a fundamentally different company like OpenAI or Anthropic would trade, and IPO windows have reopened faster in cycles with genuine underlying revenue growth than in pure-hype cycles. What to watch next: whether the next major AI-adjacent IPO prices below or above its range, and whether that outcome shifts OpenAI's or Anthropic's own listing timelines.
