Only 58 of 254 Backlogged Startups Still Look IPO-Bound

What's New

The pent-up supply of US venture-backed IPOs is far smaller than the shortfall in listings implies. PitchBook's Institutional Research Group argues this in The US VC IPO Backlog Is a Myth, using its VC Time to Exit Predictor. The model gave 254 companies better-than-even odds of listing between 2023 and the end of 2025. Only 53 did. Of the rest, 112 still rate as likely eventual listers, and just 58 of those are expected to list within three years. Allocators waiting on a wave of deferred listings should plan for a trickle, with liquidity coming from private rounds instead.

Why It Matters

Conventional wisdom holds that a reopened window clears a queue. The source shows the queue has thinned, and the companies that remain have raised enough private capital to keep waiting on their own terms. Secondary buyers who paid up for backlog names on an IPO timeline are the ones exposed. So are LPs counting on 2023-era unicorns to return capital through public listings. Today's pipeline belongs mostly to companies that scored low in 2023, led by AI.

By The Numbers

• 592 VC-backed IPOs were expected from companies scored at the start of 2023. Only 139 happened by the end of 2025.

• 73% of backlog companies have raised a VC round since 2023. About half of the fallen candidates did.

• 8x the size of comparable rounds: the average post-2023 round for backlog companies, skewed by outsized deals at Databricks, Waymo, Scale AI and Stripe. Several doubled as liquidity events for employees and early investors.

• 25.8% is how far the median VC-backed IPO has trailed the Morningstar US Growth Index. That gap is measured over the first 120 days of trading.

What To Watch

• Anthropic's reception. It publicly filed its S-1 on October 26, with a listing reported for as soon as November. The source ties the reopening of the window to how the market receives Anthropic and OpenAI, and OpenAI has ruled out a 2026 IPO.

• Crusoe and the cost of AI infrastructure debt. Crusoe is the model's most confident near-term candidate among the largest companies and operates in the segment where CoreWeave's bond yields neared 15% in October. Another selloff there pushes its listing out.

• Watch whether Discord publicly files its S-1 before year-end. Its confidential filing targeted a March debut, and the secondary market valued it at around $8.5 billion in July, down from $15 billion in 2021.

• Post-IPO performance over the next two quarters. If new listings keep trailing growth stocks by double digits, backlog companies will keep raising privately.

The Wrap

Private capital, and the liquidity it now carries, has replaced the IPO as the exit path for most 2023-era candidates. That holds while institutional investors keep funding up rounds and tender offers for the largest private companies, and while new listings trade below growth benchmarks. It fails if Anthropic prices well and holds its mark through the first quarter of trading, which would pull Stripe, Rippling and the rest of the backlog forward. The next two quarters of AI listings decide which path the 2027 pipeline takes.