Exits in 2026: record IPOs at the top, while most companies still leave through a sale

In the first half of 2026 global startup funding reached its highest level on record: $510bn, more than all of 2025 ($440bn) and above the previous half-year high of $375bn set in H2 2021. But the part that matters to early-stage backers is not the money going in, it is the money coming out. After two years of a nearly shut exit door, both IPOs and M&A functioned again in 2026. The practical question is: functioned for whom.

The record sits at the very top of the pyramid

On 12 June 2026 SpaceX listed on Nasdaq, raising roughly $75bn and closing its first day at a $1.77 trillion market cap — the largest IPO ever completed and the largest liquidity event in the history of venture-backed companies. That single deal accounted for $75bn of the quarter's $104.8bn. Days after listing, SpaceX bought AI coding platform Cursor for $60bn, the priciest purchase of a private venture-backed startup on record. Concentration on the funding side looks the same: OpenAI and Anthropic together took more than 40% of all venture funding in the first half.

The real exit route: 995 acquisitions versus 62 listings

PitchBook and NVCA's Venture Monitor figures for 2025 restore the right ratio: 995 acquisitions of US venture-backed companies worth $112.7bn, against 62 public listings worth $119.4bn. By event count, 94% were acquisitions; by dollars, listings edged ahead only because a handful were gigantic. These are the two measures angel investors most often conflate: the probability of exit for any given company belongs to the M&A market, while most of a vintage's value pools in a few listings at the top.

The 2026 data reinforces it. In Q1, startup M&A value topped $56.6bn — the third-highest quarter since the 2022 downturn — while listings were still thin (34 IPOs raising $15.3bn). The two biggest Q1 deals were Savvy Games Group's $6bn purchase of ByteDance's gaming platform Moonton and Capital One's $5.15bn acquisition of fintech Brex. On PitchBook data compiled by Stout, Q1 exit transaction volume rose 8.8% quarter on quarter, with IT accounting for 56.1% of all exit transactions — well above that sector's 41.6% share of venture-backed companies.

The geography of exits is tilting toward Asia

A detail that gets little attention: in Q1 2026, 21 venture-backed companies exited above $1bn globally — 13 of them from China, four more from elsewhere in Asia and just four from the US. The largest Q1 IPO was Japan's PayPay, a mobile payments company valued at $10bn on listing. Two Chinese foundation labs, Z.ai and MiniMax, also debuted in the quarter. For allocators in Southeast Asia this changes the comparison set: reference exit valuations no longer sit only on Nasdaq.

And the listing window is not open indefinitely. In early September 2026 Crunchbase noted the public-market window narrowing just as the post-Labor Day filing sprint began. Its predictive tools flag only a handful of private companies with at least a 40% probability of going public within six months; the watchlist spans AI, fintech, crypto, consumer health and climate technology, including smart-ring maker Oura and productivity platform Notion. Anthropic, the most closely watched candidate, sits outside that near-term screen, with the model favouring a six- to 12-month timeline.