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The US market for initial public offerings has exploded back to life with the busiest week for Wall Street listings since a boom four years ago.
Buy now, pay later group Klarna, the Winklevoss twins’ crypto exchange Gemini and Blackstone-backed engineering group Legence were among seven large-cap companies that went public in the US this week, the highest tally since late 2021, according to IPO research group Renaissance Capital.
The deals raised more than $4bn and mark the latest in a series of recent offerings that bankers hope will lay the groundwork for a long-awaited US IPO recovery after a barren spell prolonged by the market volatility unleashed by President Donald Trump’s tariffs in early April.
“In addition to the relative stability requisite for a healthy IPO market, the pent-up demand from the sell side, the buy side, the founders and the private equity groups was real and almost aching,” said Marc Jaffe, managing partner at Latham and Watkins, the law firm that worked on four of this week’s large deals.
Black Rock Coffee Bar, rideshare group Via Transportation, blockchain platform Figure Technology Solutions and LB Pharmaceuticals also made their US market debuts. Goldman Sachs acted as lead underwriter on six of the deals.
The companies met with a generally positive reaction. Via, Legence and LB Pharmaceuticals all posted modest gains. Figure surged 28 per cent and Black Rock Coffee Bar jumped 38 per cent.
“Outcomes have been strong, and if this market backdrop holds, total US IPO volumes are on track to exceed last year,” said Sumit Mukherjee, head of equity capital markets at JPMorgan.
“The pipeline remains robust through September,” he added.
Some of Klarna’s biggest backers were quick to herald investors’ appetite for tech listings even as the company on Friday slipped towards its offering price of $40 a share following a 15 per cent gain on its first day of trading earlier in the week.
“We had three years that were very dry years, [with] very little liquidity globally for tech companies,” said Niklas Zennström, founder of Atomico, a venture capital fund that invested in Klarna, and co-founder of Skype.
“So in that context, it’s really significant now that this year has seen many companies come public and . . . be well received in the market.”
Gemini raised $425mn in cash at a valuation of $3.5bn — roughly 25 times its past four quarters’ combined revenue — and surged as much as 64 per cent on Friday before sliding later in the session to finish narrowly above its initial offering price. Trump’s pick to run the main US crypto watchdog this week accused the Winklevoss brothers of interfering with his nomination in a dispute over the agency’s case against Gemini.
Large companies that went public earlier this year have broadly either shot higher or slumped dramatically: artificial intelligence data centre operator CoreWeave is up almost 180 per cent while US liquefied natural gas provider Venture Global has dropped 40 per cent.
Design software maker Figma and crypto exchange Bullish both raised more than $1bn in their summer IPOs. Their shares have tumbled since surging during their first few trading days.
Klarna was the eighth US IPO to raise more than $1bn this year, up from a total of seven in 2024 but far below the 28 plus-$1bn deals in 2021.
Only a recession in the US would now be enough to knock the IPO market off course, according to Jaffe.
“Nothing seems to indicate things are going that way,” he said.
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