2026 Is The Biggest IPO Year In History. But Take Out Space X And Right Now It’s One of the Worst. | Saa Str AI

Overview

AI VC AI Mentor: Digital Jason + Amelia AI Startup Benchmarking

AI Agent Playbook Free e Books

	e Book: Hiring a Great VP of Sales
	e Book: Raising Capital
	e Book:  The First $1m ARR

Details

University All Posts Podcasts The Top CROs VC Fundraising Top Videos Q&A Best of Saa Str #1 Bestselling Book Search Everything Join the Community

Free e Books

	e Book: Hiring a Great VP of Sales
	e Book: Raising Capital
	e Book:  The First $1m ARR

AI Annual 2026 Events Overview Sponsors

	Event Sponsorship
	Media Sponsorship

Digital AI Day 2026 (Free) Speaker Submissions Speaker Requirements Overview

2026 Is The Biggest IPO Year In History. But Take Out Space X And Right Now It’s One of the Worst.

A good year for IPOs. A bit less so for their performance. And not a year at all for Saa S.

Per Pitch Book there has been $1,786.8 billion in US VC-backed IPO value through July 28. That’s not a record. That’s five prior years stacked on top of each other and then doubled.

Space X went public on June 12 at

So of that

The other 43 VC-backed IPOs this year combined are worth roughly $17 billion.

That’s not a boom. That’s 2023 with a trillion-dollar asterisk stapled to it.

1. The count says “normal.” The value says “one guy.”

44 VC-backed IPOs through July 28 versus 50 for all of 2025. Annualize it and you land somewhere around 75, so the count is up meaningfully.

But the count per se was never the problem even in lean years. 2023 and 2024 both had roughly 40-45 IPOs too. The problem has always been that the good companies weren’t going out. Looking at the 2026 class, that hasn’t changed as much as the chart suggests.  Databricks’ CEO said 2026 isn’t a good time to go public.  That says it all for B2B.

Also note Pitch Book’s “deal value” is post-money valuation at listing, not money raised. Nobody handed $1.8 trillion in cash to founders and LPs this year. The actual proceeds number is a rounding error against that bar.

This is the part everyone skips because the headline valuations are so loud.

Space X: down ~30% from its debut as of Thursday’s close

Cerebras: down ~34.7%, and that’s after a 19.9% one-day gain

The excuse being offered is macro. The war in Iran, Chinese chipmakers coming for US AI compute. But look at what these companies have in common instead:

Enormous capex. Long roads to revenue. Businesses whose entire story is “the AI market keeps going up.”

Space X spent

Public investors are doing the thing they always eventually do. They’re at least in part pricing the cash flows, not the narrative.

3. The private-public gap didn’t close. It moved.

For four years the story was “the IPO window is shut.” It wasn’t, exactly. What was shut was the willingness of public investors to pay 2021 private-round prices.

2026 tested that. A handful of the most-hyped private companies in the world went out at or near their private marks, and the market marked them down 30%+ within weeks.

The gap between the last private round and what a public investor will pay is still there. It just got tested at a much larger scale, with a much better company, and the answer came back the same.

4. Not one of the 2026 IPOs is classic B2B software

Go down the 2026 list. Space X. Cerebras. Quantinuum. X-Energy. Hawk Eye 360. Space, AI silicon, quantum, nuclear, geospatial intelligence.

Zero application software companies. Zero B2B software.

And it’s not a timing thing. Crunchbase looked at new IPO filings and found no venture-backed B2B unicorn had filed at all in 2026. Not one submitted paperwork. Enterprise software has gone quiet.

Databricks was supposed to be the one.

When a company at $5.4B growing 65% says the market isn’t there, the market isn’t there.

This is the real reason the pipeline is empty, and it has nothing to do with Iran.

Navan and Chime are both trading below their opening prices.

Asana is down ~50% in 2026. Adobe is down 29%. Service Now is off more than 30%. Salesforce fell 35% over six months.

That’s the mechanism. Public markets aren’t just declining to pay 2021 prices for Saa S. They’re actively pricing in the possibility that a foundation model company ships your product as a feature. That’s a different and much harder problem than a multiple reset.

6. The market isn’t repricing B2B. It’s sorting it.

Datadog is up more than 80% in 2026, trading near a 52-week high.

Snowflake was 50% below its year-ago price in April and is now positive on the year, after its best single day ever.

Mongo DB was down more than 20% early and has recovered.

JFrog jumped 43% on earnings. Bank of America’s “Fab Five” — Snowflake, Datadog, JFrog, Mongo DB, Twilio — were collectively up 30% year to date against a software ETF down 12%.

In May, software stocks had their best month since 2001. The “Saa Spocalypse” talk faded almost entirely.

So the dividing line isn’t quality, and it isn’t growth. Salesforce is a great business. Adobe prints cash. Both got hammered. Datadog and Snowflake got re-rated to highs.

The line is whether AI makes you more necessary or less.

Datadog’s argument is that AI makes software systems more complex, and complexity means more to monitor. Q1 revenue crossed

Figma’s problem is that Anthropic shipped a design tool.

The pattern is hard to miss: consumption-priced infrastructure that AI consumes more of is winning. Seat-priced application software that AI might do instead is losing.

That’s a much more useful read than “multiples compressed.” Multiples didn’t compress. They separated.

Two things cut against the gloom, and both deserve to be said:

Biotech worked. A Bloomberg biotech IPO index was up 55% through July 21 — outperforming the 2026 AI IPO class outright. When the story is a binary clinical outcome instead of a compute narrative, public investors showed up.

And the broader IPO cohort has held. The Renaissance IPO Index — the largest and most liquid US IPOs of the last three years — was up 12.7% on the year through Wednesday, against the S&P 500’s 8.3%. Recent IPOs as a class are beating the market.

So the aftermath isn’t uniformly bad. It’s specifically bad for capital-intensive AI infrastructure bets that priced at private marks.

A record year for liquidity has not been a record year for the stocks that produced it. And for B2B Saa S specifically, it hasn’t been a year at all.

Source: Pitch Book, US VC-backed IPO activity as of July 28, 2026.

20VC x Saa Str: The $1.4 Trillion IPO Wave Coming in 2026: Space X, Anthropic, and Databricks Will Change Everything

The Latest Saa S IPO is a Re-IPO. Expect More of Them

20VC x Saa Str: The $1.4 Trillion IPO Wave Coming in 2026: Space X, Anthropic, and Databricks Will Change Everything

The Latest Saa S IPO is a Re-IPO. Expect More of Them

Get from

Key Takeaways

• AI VC AI Mentor: Digital Jason + Amelia AI Startup Benchmarking

• AI Agent Playbook Free e Books

    e Book: Hiring a Great VP of Sales
    e Book: Raising Capital
    e Book:  The First $1m ARR
  

• University All Posts Podcasts The Top CROs VC Fundraising Top Videos Q&A Best of Saa Str #1 Bestselling Book Search Everything Join the Community

• Free e Books

    e Book: Hiring a Great VP of Sales
    e Book: Raising Capital
    e Book:  The First $1m ARR
  

• AI Annual 2026 Events Overview Sponsors

    Event Sponsorship
    Media Sponsorship