2025 was the best year for IPOs since 2021

2025 is on track to be the best year for initial public offerings — when companies go public on stock exchanges — since 2021.

IPOs raised a total of $46 billion this year, according to Bloomberg. That’s far below the early-COVID IPO boom, but it’s better than any of the last three years.

Companies thinking about going public pay close attention to how the stock market is doing. They want to enter it when investors are feeling bullish.

“When the market goes down, IPO volume collapses. When the market goes up, IPO volume jumps,” explained Jay Ritter, director of the IPO Initiative at the University of Florida.

That partly explains why more companies have gone public this year: The stock market’s been doing really well.

But the market did well the last couple of years, too, when IPOs were not all that popular. And even though IPO volume rose in 2025, it’s still lower than it was pre-pandemic. One reason? There’s a lot of private money flowing to startup companies.

“So they've been able to raise large amounts of money without tapping public capital markets,” Ritter said.

But for companies that want to significantly grow — especially in tech — private capital has its limits, per Santosh Rao, a partner and the head of research at Manhattan Venture Partners.

“You need to, at some point, go public and raise public capital,” he said.

Rao added that more companies reached that point this year, and after a rocky start to 2025, more of them felt comfortable going public in the second half of the year.

“They were waiting for the dust to settle, for the coast to clear, for some visibility down the road,” he said. “I think they have visibility on the tariffs. They have visibility on the rates.”

And if that visibility continues, some big IPOs could be coming in 2026. Both OpenAI and SpaceX have started laying the groundwork to go public.