Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX IPOs Could Outvalue 25 Years of US Tech Exits

SpaceX is already a public company valued at $1.77 trillion. OpenAI and Anthropic are approaching trillion-dollar valuations of their own and are preparing their own stock market debuts. According to an analysis cited by TechCrunch, the combined value of these three IPOs will exceed that of all venture capital exit deals in the United States since 2000.

The NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Monitor report, cited by TechCrunch, makes the point clearly: the stock market debuts of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic will generate more value than all exit deals involving US venture-backed companies since 2000. That's more than two decades in which Google, Tesla, and Meta went public, and companies like LinkedIn, Slack, and WhatsApp were acquired for sums exceeding $20 billion each.

Unprecedented scale

By comparison, the US Securities and Exchange Commission recorded just $70 billion in total initial public offering proceeds for the entire previous year. SpaceX alone raised an amount at its debut that dwarfs nearly every previous tech IPO in history. Uber's 2019 IPO, considered one of the largest in the tech sector at the time and worth $84 billion, today accounts for less than 5 percent of SpaceX's valuation alone.

Russell Brandom, the author of the analysis, notes that offerings of this size test the limits of the market's financial infrastructure. It's not just about investor demand, but also about the ability of the clearing system, investment banks, and regulators to handle transactions of this scale in a short period of time.

Why valuations are so high

Two factors are driving these record numbers. The first is the trend of companies staying private much longer than before, which lets them grow and go public at far higher valuations than in previous tech cycles. The second is the nature of the AI business itself, which requires enormous spending on model training and data center construction, driving aggressive fundraising and, as analysts note, artificially inflating valuations.

The IPO calendar is set to be tight. According to plans cited in industry analyses, September is expected to bring a round of investor meetings ahead of OpenAI's IPO, with October seeing a similar process for Anthropic. Both companies are operating during this period under additional oversight from the Trump administration, which requires government approval before the release of their most powerful models.

What it means for capital markets

For the venture capital funds that invested in these companies at early stages, it means a payout that, by some estimates, exceeds an entire decade's worth of prior returns from the industry. For the rest of the tech market, the scale of these three offerings could change how institutional investors price the risk tied to capital concentration in a handful of AI companies.

For Polish investors and funds tracking the AI market, it's a signal that capital at the highest level is increasingly concentrating around a narrow group of frontier labs. Poland's homegrown startup ecosystem, including growing funding rounds for Polish tech companies, operates in the shadow of these gigantic numbers, but benefits from the same inflow of venture capital seeking a place to land after record-breaking Silicon Valley exits.

Sources: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX are bigger than the last 25 years of tech exits (TechCrunch).