AI startups race to IPO

As OpenAI joins Anthropic and SpaceX in the IPO queue, the question for Wall Street: Is there enough money for all of them?

IPOs are famously momentum-driven; companies go public when other companies go public. But the sheer amount of money these AI giants will need — SpaceX is expected to raise $75 billion on Friday — raises concerns they’ll crowd out fast followers. “This is a terrible year to go public,” the CEO of Databricks, which is valued at $134 billion and has flirted with an IPO since before ChatGPT’s release, told Bloomberg.

One to watch is Bending Spoons, which has rolled up fading internet brands like AOL and Eventbrite with an eye toward running them profitably. It is shooting for a $20 billion valuation — no moonshots required.

Retail investors will be key. Fidelity dropped the velvet rope for SpaceX shares, allowing customers with as little as $2,000 in their brokerage accounts to buy into the IPO. The company’s bankers have received orders for twice as many shares as it intends to sell, according to Bloomberg, a lower ratio than other tech IPOs, but remarkable given the size of the offering. Still, $75 billion is enough money to be noticed if it’s pulled out of other market bets: Keep an eye on the Treasury tape when shares price Thursday night.

SpaceX is “an incredible company, but one has to wonder where that $75 billion is going to come from,” Mitchell Green, managing partner of Lead Edge Capital, a $9 billion tech growth equity firm, told Semafor last month.