Venture Investors Face an Unprecedented Test From Trillion-Dollar IPOs

Emily Zheng described the coming wave of venture-backed public listings as “uncharted territory,” not because the IPO market is merely reopening, but because the expected offerings are larger than recent history offers a clean way to benchmark.

Her baseline was the past 10 years of U.S. VC-backed public listings, which she put at $1.5 trillion in aggregate value. SpaceX alone, she said, would be greater than that decade-long figure. On proceeds, the comparison is similarly disproportionate: SpaceX is looking at $75 billion, while OpenAI and Anthropic together are looking at a combined $100 billion. Zheng said that combined figure would exceed all IPO proceeds raised over the past decade.

The core investor concern, raised by Caroline Hyde, was whether these mega-IPOs could “suck oxygen out of the room” for the rest of the market. Zheng did not predict crowd-out directly. She emphasized that the supply of new equity is so large relative to prior VC-backed public listings that normal comparisons may not be useful.

PitchBook’s IPO-values chart put the scale problem in one frame. Its 2026 estimate, explicitly marked as including SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, was $3.807 trillion — far above every prior annual value shown in the graphic.

A separate PitchBook graphic said the U.S. IPO market is picking up steam, with 32 VC-backed IPOs year to date and the market on track for roughly 77 IPOs this year. It also stated that the SpaceX IPO was expected to top a decade of VC-backed exits. The broader IPO market may be reopening, but the value of the year could be dominated by a small number of unusually large companies.

Ed Ludlow pressed on timing because the listings could, in principle, cluster within the same year. He summarized the known sequence as Anthropic having confidentially submitted its S-1, SpaceX expected to price on June 11 and trade soon after, and OpenAI potentially moving in September. His question was whether all of that could happen within the balance of 2026.

Zheng treated the answer as contingent, with SpaceX as the first market test. She acknowledged “pent up demand,” but said the numbers are large enough that investors will watch whether demand for SpaceX is real and sustained. If SpaceX “flops,” she said, Anthropic could choose to wait until later to go public, allowing volatility to even out.

The important distinction in her answer was procedural: a confidential filing is a necessary step toward an IPO, but it is not a promise that the listing will occur within months, or even within the next year. Anthropic’s confidential filing may place it in the public-market process, but Zheng’s point was that the actual timing remains conditional on market reception.

Bloomberg’s market-cap comparison underscored why SpaceX would be watched as more than an isolated listing. The graphic placed the approximate IPO market caps for SpaceX and Anthropic alongside major public technology companies. SpaceX was shown at $1.8 trillion, above Tesla at $1.6 trillion and below TSMC at $2.0 trillion. Anthropic was shown at $0.96 trillion.

That comparison sharpened the issue without settling it: these are not ordinary late-stage venture listings seeking public-market liquidity. The proposed market capitalizations place SpaceX and Anthropic near some of the largest listed technology companies, making the reception of the first offering relevant to the rest of the pipeline.

Caroline Hyde raised a second concern: the AI financing cycle is circular. She pointed to Anthropic paying $1.25 billion per month to SpaceX for compute, and said investors will eventually see in Anthropic’s public filing how reliant the company is on Google or Amazon. Her question was whether those dependencies should worry investors, including venture investors exposed to many of the same names.

Zheng’s answer was that the AI cycle is “interconnected” across the venture market, and not only through the largest companies. She said 30% of U.S. VC-backed startups are AI-native or AI-adjacent. Because so much of the venture market now depends on AI, investors are focused on whether AI valuations and IPO pricing can be upheld, and whether the technology can move toward profitability.

The issue, in Ed Ludlow’s framing, is not simply that some venture firms may own stakes in the same companies. He said SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are “all pitching the same thing,” and asked whether history offers any warning signal for three companies trying to occupy the same lane.

Zheng did not supply a precedent or endorse a specific historical analogy. She said that for a technology this transformative, the public markets have not seen a similar case. That absence of precedent is part of the investment problem she described throughout: the scale is unusual, the timing is uncertain, and the companies are being evaluated in a market where AI exposure is already widespread across venture portfolios.