Analysis
There have been 217 US IPOs in 2026 as of August 5, about 6.9% ahead of the same point in 2025, per stockanalysis.com. Read alone, that number says the market reopened. Read alongside what actually priced, it says something narrower.
Take the first three trading days of August as a sample. One operating company priced -- Attovia Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech, at $17 for $289 million. Everything else was a blank-check vehicle at $10 a unit: TCGX Acquisition, ARC Group Securities Acquisition I, BOA Acquisition Corp. II, with GX Acquisition Corp. III and 1776 Acquisition Corp filing behind them. That is the composition of the count. Biotech and SPACs make the numerator; venture-backed software does not.
The mega-deals are real and they distort the picture in the other direction. SpaceX listed in June at roughly a $1.75 trillion target valuation. OpenAI and Anthropic have both filed confidentially. Goldman Sachs projected US IPO proceeds could reach $160 billion this year on the strength of those names. But a market where the only technology listings are three of the largest private companies ever assembled is not a functioning exit market for the Series C company with $40 million in ARR -- it is two separate markets sharing a statistic.
“One operating company priced -- Attovia Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech, at $17 for $289 million.”
That gap is what the SPAC filings are responding to. Sponsors raising $75 million to $200 million trusts with reduced promotes are underwriting exactly the $300 million to $1.5 billion band that has no traditional path right now. Whether that is a solution or a repeat of 2021 depends entirely on redemption rates and sponsor backstops at close -- neither of which is knowable from a filing.
The honest counterweight to our own argument: the count is not fake, and a rising biotech calendar does eventually pull other sectors along. Apnimed's 56% first-day pop on July 31 and Attovia's pricing four trading days later is a real sequence, not a coincidence, and sequences like that historically precede broader windows by a quarter or two.
Our read: judge the window by median deal size and sector mix, not by count. The specific thing to watch is the first venture-backed enterprise software company under $5 billion to file publicly. Until one does and trades above issue for a month, the 2026 exit market for ordinary venture portfolios is secondaries, strategic M&A and continuation vehicles -- which is where nearly all of the DPI actually came from this year.
