Desperate buyers are in a race to secure a dwindling supply of secondary shares in Anthropic, driving the AI company's valuation on some sites to $1 trillion, a price that would have seemed unthinkable even a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, traders Business Insider spoke with are seeing slumping demand for OpenAI, which is now trading at a discount to Anthropic, despite OpenAI being valued at $852 billion, more than twice Anthropic's valuation in their most recent funding rounds.

Anthropic's valuation now hovers at around $1 trillion on Forge Global, a leading private marketplace exchange, its CEO Kelly Rodriques told Business Insider. OpenAI's valuation on the platform is $880 billion, a slight uptick from its March funding round…Read Full Article

Greg Martin, managing director of private markets at Rainmaker Securities, discusses the signs of life the IPO market is showing and what impact the expectations of large listings from Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX are having on investors. Martin speaks with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow on “Bloomberg Tech.”

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SpaceX’s initial public offering may be the largest IPO ever, but it might just be a prelude to the largest merger ever—a combination of Tesla with Elon Musk’s space venture.

On April 1, SpaceX reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO. It’s likely to raise $75 billion, more than double the $29 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019, and three times the $25 billion Alibaba Group Holding raised in 2014. Its valuation could come in close to $2 trillion, immediately making the company the sixth-most valuable in the U.S. Not bad for a venture that was worth only $350 billion a year ago and was founded by a 30-year-old who thought it was dumb to dispose of rockets as if they were plastic straws…Read Full Article

• SpaceX would be sixth-largest US-listed firm at IPO valuation

• Starlink underpins majority of SpaceX's revenue

• Debate centers on which publicly traded firms are truly comparable, if any

April 8 (Reuters) - Elon Musk’s SpaceX is seeking a $1.75 trillion valuation in its forthcoming initial public offering. How far into the stratosphere is that?

Going by common Wall Street metrics, the answer is, way out there. SpaceX would immediately become the sixth most-valuable publicly listed U.S. firm, worth more ​than the likes of Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab, which has been publicly listed for more than a decade, and Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N), opens new tab, a company older than SpaceX founder Elon Musk…Read Full Article

Every quarter, Setter Capital, a secondary advisory firm that has completed more than $30 billion in private market transactions since 2006, surveys hundreds of investors to rank the 30 most sought-after startup shares on the secondary market. The resulting “Setter 30” list is a map of private market conviction: which companies investors want so badly they will pay a premium to buy someone else’s stake, rather than wait for a primary round or a public listing. The Q1 2026 edition carries a set of signals that anyone tracking venture capital or the broader technology market may be noticing already.

Taken together, the data points to a secondary market that has grown structurally more important, is concentrating around a smaller number of very large bets, and is beginning to behave less like a niche liquidity mechanism and more like a parallel exchange…Read Full Article

SpaceX's (SPAX.PVT) IPO filing last week set the stage for what could be the largest IPO in history at a target valuation north of $2 trillion. It could also provide a big boost beyond Elon Musk's own rocket company.

Shares of Rocket Lab (RKLB) surged roughly 10%; Planet Labs (PL) jumped more than 10%, and AST SpaceMobile (ASTS) climbed even more on the news. The market's reaction provided something of  a confirmation that a SpaceX public listing won't just benefit SpaceX shareholders…Read Full Article and Watch Video

Glen Anderson has been brokering trades in private company shares since 2010, back when the number of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market could be counted on two hands. Today, he says, there are thousands.

As president of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities, whose focus includes private securities markets — it facilitates transactions in roughly 1,000 stocks — Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the most nail-biting moments in the history of the secondary market. And right now, he suggests, the narrative has three main characters: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX…Read Full Article

• Buyers have been willing to pay a premium of up to 40% to buy Anduril shares.

• The steep markup reflects a two-tiered class for accessing stock in the hottest startups.

• Data from Caplight highlights a supply imbalance, with buyer demand surging to 97% while sellers' demand is at 3%.

Anduril hasn't even finalized its next funding round, and investors are already eager to pay up like it's a sold-out concert. As marquee venture firms Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz line up to back the defense tech startup at a reported $60 billion valuation, others shut out of the deal are scrambling to buy shares on secondary markets at steep premiums…Read Ful Article

Key Points

• Elon Musk’s net worth soared past $800 billion this week after he merged SpaceX with xAI in a deal that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion.

• For Musk to become the world’s first trillionaire, SpaceX would have to reach $1.6 trillion in value, assuming Tesla’s stock price stays flat.

• With Tesla’s brand value and core auto sales in decline, and its long-promised robotaxis and humanoid robots still in development, the company’s stock price is down about 9% this year.

Elon Musk’s journey to becoming the world’s first trillionaire will likely be powered by rockets rather than cars, as SpaceX now accounts for nearly two-thirds of the Tesla CEO’s wealth…Read Full Article

Young AI startups looking to tap the public markets still won’t have an easy path, as they will need to prepare for more detailed financial disclosures at a time when both companies are burning cash, Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker Securities, told MarketWatch.

“They’ll have to manage their negative cash flow,” Martin said. OpenAI in particular “needs to clarify their specific position in the market, and have a better plan to get to a profitable position sooner.”…Read Full Article

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SpaceX is reportedly lining up four major Wall Street banks for a 2026 IPO that could provide the reset the market needs. 

The company just completed a tender offer at an $800 billion valuation, and secondary market demand is through the roof. If SpaceX goes public anywhere near its rumored $1.5 trillion valuation, it could trigger an IPO cascade for other late-stage unicorns like OpenAI, Stripe, and Databricks. 

Watch as Equity host Rebecca Bellan chats with Greg Martin, Managing Director at Rainmaker Securities, about why this IPO feels different, how tech employees are cashing out through secondary markets before companies go public, and what investors are actually looking for in pre-IPO shares. 

In 1999, stock buyers had a cornucopia of new options as U.S. companies went public at a near-record clip. The crop included names like Nvidia and BlackRock that, for those who purchased them on the first day of trading, have delivered spectacular long-term returns…Read Full Article

• Five months after Scale AI’s high-profile founder joined Meta in a blockbuster deal, the startup’s CFO is trying to show that the company remains on a growth trajectory.

• “People mischaracterize this deal as some sort of acquihire or some sort of licensing deal, which is not true,” said Dennis Cinelli in his first public interview after joining Scale as CFO in 2022.

• Cinelli said Scale’s data business has grown every month since the Meta deal.

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The startup world celebrates stories of founders who scratch and claw for years and, finally, become multi-millionaires when the business they built goes public or is acquired. These tales of wealth are common in crypto too—though the path to a big payday is often much shorter.

Case in point: Bam Azizi founded crypto payments firm Mesh in 2020, and this August raised $130 million in a so-called Series B funding round. In the ordinary course of things, capital raised in a Series A or Series B round goes almost entirely to fund a startup’s growth. But in this case, the round included at least $20 million for Azizi himself…Read Full Article

• Founders have raised more than $24 billion since the November election for special purpose acquisition companies, with a sizable number of them having ties to Trump's inner circle.

• The bulk of the action is in businesses that pair well with "America First" rhetoric, including nuclear and quantum computing, and cryptocurrencies.

• SPAC skeptics caution that the investments can be exceedingly risky, with only about 11% of companies that have gone public through a SPAC merger since 2019 trading above their issue price.

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• A surge of interest in private companies, particularly those related to artificial intelligence, is driving more inquiries and trades on platforms offering accredited investors the chance to invest in pre-IPO names.

• Trading volume on the private secondary market run by EquityZen Securities more than doubled in the third quarter versus a year ago, and the total value of buy orders on Rainmaker Securities’ platform rose more than three times from the first quarter.

• Investor appetite is soaring for AI-related names, including both AI-native startups and established software as a service firms embedding AI into their offerings, with AI-related firms accounting for about a third of private stock trading.

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Sept 18 (Reuters) - Cybersecurity firm Netskope commanded an $8.79 billion valuation as its shares jumped 21% in their Nasdaq debut on Thursday, adding to a string of successful tech IPOs this year.

The Santa Clara, California-based company's shares opened at $23 apiece, well above the $19 offer price. Netskope raised $908.2 million in its IPO by selling 47.8 million shares at the top end of its bumped-up range of $17 to $19 apiece.

The U.S. IPO market is enjoying its strongest momentum in years, with several tech listings, including design software maker Figma (FIG.N), opens new tab, delivering blowout debuts, signaling pent-up investor demand for new issues…Read Full Article

StubHub Holdings Inc. is hoping to excite investors ahead of its initial public offering with its plan to expand its business selling new tickets for sports and other live events.

The company, which is primarily a marketplace for secondary ticket sales, has plenty of demand for its offering that could raise as much as $851 million. The deal, which prices late on Tuesday, is multiple times oversubscribed, Bloomberg News reported earlier on Monday.…Read Full Article

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In the lead-up to its public offering, tech unicorn Figma (FIG) priced its shares at $33. When the stock closed its first trading session on July 31, the share price had rocketed up to $115.50 — 250% above where the company priced the stock.

Just two months earlier, stablecoin infrastructure operator Circle Internet Group (CRCL) priced its IPO at $31 and then closed its first day, June 5, at $83.23, marking a more than 165% increase.

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Gemini Space Station (GEMI) and Black Rock Coffee Bar (BRCB) will be the latest additions to the New York Stock Exchange as they prepare to begin trading publicly during Friday's session.

These two companies join the ranks of companies that have gone public via an IPO in 2025, which includes Klarna (KLAR), Figure Technology Solutions (FIGR), Chime Financial (CHYM), Figma (FIG), CoreWeave (CRWV), Circle Internet Group (CRCL), Bullish (BLSH), Firefly Aerospace (FLY), and eToro (ETOR).