Analysis
The public market is open right now -- just not for the companies most VCs actually want to exit through it. TRex Bio and Retension Pharmaceuticals both cleared cleanly as small, clinical-stage biotech stories with modest capital needs. Firmus, trying to list at a much larger valuation, pulled its offering the same day it was due to publish terms.
Our read: this isn't a sector story, it's a size-and-capital-intensity story. Biotech IPOs under $150 million ask underwriters to underwrite a clean clinical narrative and a defined burn rate -- exactly the kind of risk institutional buyers can price confidently in a turbulent week. A $31 billion data-center developer asks them to underwrite years of capex, power contracts, and a growth story that depends on AI infrastructure demand holding up -- a much harder bet to size correctly when markets are jumpy.
“Our read: this isn't a sector story, it's a size-and-capital-intensity story.”
That split matters more than the generic "is the IPO window open" framing most coverage defaults to. It's open, selectively, for the kind of deal that doesn't ask underwriters to make a macro call. It's closed for anything that does. Iambic Therapeutics raising its own IPO target from roughly $100 million to $150 million this same week is a small, encouraging data point in the same direction -- demand exists, at a size underwriters can comfortably price.
Room for disagreement: it's possible this is simply sequencing, not a durable size ceiling -- Firmus may have been an unusually large, unusually exposed deal, since AI-data-center capex is one of the most contested growth narratives in the market right now, and a different multibillion-dollar listing in a less contested sector could still clear. We also haven't seen a $500 million-to-$1 billion deal test this market yet; the real ceiling might sit well above what's priced so far, and our read could be mistaking one failed mega-deal for a structural limit.
For founders and boards planning a 2026 or 2027 listing, the practical takeaway is the same either way: price for what the market has actually proven it can clear, not for what it priced in 2024 or 2025. Underwriters are telling you the number right now, even if nobody's saying it in those words.