My buddy Jamie teaches high school in Boulder. He called me in a panic last week.
“Matt,” he said, “I’m supposed to retire in three years. But I don’t have enough money. Where are the IPOs? Where’d they go? I need some big winners and I’m not seeing any!”
I told him to take a deep breath…
Then I explained that the winners hadn’t disappeared. They’d just moved.
So today, I’ll tell you, like I told Jamie, why they’d moved — and where to find them.
$108 Billion — Raised in Private
So far this year, twenty-one venture-backed startups — private, pre-IPO companies — have raised funding rounds of $1 billion or more.
Meanwhile, know how many billion-dollar IPOs there’ve been? Just ten of them!
And here’s the shocking part. The private rounds raised a total of $108 billion. But meanwhile, the big IPOs raised just $13.3 billion.
Here’s what it looks like in a chart:
As you can see by the white bars versus the blue ones, private markets aren’t just outpacing public markets by a hair — they’re crushing them. This is a dramatic reversal from recent history, when an IPO was the golden ticket for any startup with a pulse.
As it turns out, the real action nowadays is happening quietly, behind closed doors:
The biggest tech companies in the world are choosing to stay private.
OpenAI: The Poster Child of the New Reality
As Bloomberg explained, private companies are tapping into massive pools of capital, without ever stepping onto a public exchange.
Take OpenAI, for example. Instead of filing an S-1 and marching toward an IPO, OpenAI raised a record-breaking $40 billion private round, and then coordinated a share sale for employees — a “tender” — that valued the company at $500 billion.
That made OpenAI not just the world’s most valuable startup, but one of the highest-valued companies on Earth — public or private. (Last week, not to be outdone, SpaceX took its crown back as the most valuable startup, with a reported valuation of $800 billion.)
No ringing the bell. No quarterly-earnings calls. No public-market scrutiny.
Just capital. A lot of it.
Why Go Public When You Don’t Have To?
According to Bloomberg, the reason this is happening is simple:
Staying private has become a strategic advantage.
Chris Evdaimon, a venture investor at Baillie Gifford, put it plainly: “All of these companies… they could go public tomorrow. [But] they are benefiting in multiple different ways from staying private right now.”
For example, when you’re private:
- You can invest in high-risk strategies without Wall Street belly-aching about it.
- You can spend aggressively on growth or M&A.
- You can restructure, pivot, or experiment — all without being in the spotlight.
- And thanks to a wide range of tools including tender offers, secondaries, and investor sidecars, early employees and shareholders can still cash out.
The result is that founders, employees, and early investors are getting liquid on their private shares, well before the opening bell rings.
And with deep-pocketed investors willing to pour billions into these companies, there’s no pressure to go public — not this year, not next year, and maybe not for many years.
Why This Matters to You
Here’s what this means for you, and for my friends like Jamie who are looking for growth:
Wall Street’s profits have moved.
A company’s IPO used to be the starting gun for value creation. The biggest profits for investors started humming after a company went public.
For example, when Microsoft went public in 1986, the company’s private investors did fine — they made about 200x their money. But in the years since Microsoft’s IPO, stock market investors have now made about 5,000x their money. It’s a similar story for investors in companies like Amazon in 1997, even Facebook in 2012.
But nowadays, by the time a company IPOs, most of its growth, and almost all of its gains, have already been spoken for.
The fact is, the biggest and most exciting deals are happening in private markets:
- OpenAI.
- Databricks.
- Stripe.
- And dozens of other unicorns raising billions.
And as you learned above, they’re not just raising a little bit more money than IPOs. They’re raising 8x more.
The fastest growth is happening in the private market, where valuations are climbing, and where people are making fortunes.
So if you’re looking for big winners like my friend Jamie, this is where you can find them.
The Bottom Line
As long as startups can raise hundreds of billions without going public, they’ll stay private. And as they continue to stay private, the importance of the private markets will continue to grow.
This is where the action is. This is where the big winners are hiding.
Furthermore, you no longer need to be a millionaire or a venture capitalist to participate.
At Crowdability, we show everyday people like you how to invest in high-potential private deals — simply, safely, and often starting with just a few hundred dollars.
Now’s the time to get started.
Happy Investing,
Best Regards,
Founder
Crowdability.com
