Investors may need to wait at least a few more years until they get a crack at OpenAI as a public company, according to Renaissance Capital senior strategist Matt Kennedy, but investors who bought into the AI-led IPO market of 2025 have booked big gains already.
Since the April 8 stock market low fueled by fears about President Trump’s trade war, the Renaissance IPO ETF has posted a return of nearly 50%, close to doubling the return of the S&P 500 Index.
Can that rise continue, or is the IPO market showing the signs of the type of investor euphoria that is setting it up for a big fall?
Kennedy, whose firm specializes in IPO research, says what he expects from IPO market in the near-term is a possible “return to normalcy” rather than a repeat of the Covid-era IPO boom of 2020 and 2021 — the “crazy levels,” as he put it on this week’s CNBC “ETF Edge,” when there was a burst of deals which saw far too many pre-profit companies go public through not just IPOs but a wave of SPAC offerings.
Kennedy likens the current IPO resurgence to the post-financial crisis era, and specifically, a five-year stretch between 2014 and 2019 during which IPO offerings rebounded. But even that level of sustained pickup in deals, he said, “is going to feel like a very busy market after the past few years.”
Performance of the IPO ETF versus the S&P 500 since the April 8 low for the stock market in 2026.
According to Nate Geraci, president of NovaDius Wealth Management, the big gap between the IPO market returns since April and the stock market reflects the broader risk of sentiment, “and what you see is when animal spirits are high, it’s typically good for IPOs,” he said on “ETF Edge.”
He pointed to two of the most notable deals from the AI and crypto space: Coreweave and Circle.
“Circle is up big since it went public. Coreweave has had huge gains. And when you have companies in areas such as crypto and AI where there is already a lot of investor interest, that will help,” he said.
It has helped the ETF industry too, according to Geraci, with a “monster year” for inflows into spot crypto ETFs — $26 billion in all, with bitcoin ETFs taking in $19 billion and ether ETFs taking in $7 billion. July alone saw investors add $6 billion to bitcoin funds and $5.5 billion to ether ETFs.
Circle had given back a good deal of its gains since going public, but was still up roughly 50% this year before it reported earnings on Tuesday morning, which led to a new surge in the company’s stock price.
“Circle provided a lot of fuel for the fire,” Kennedy said. “There’s a saying on Wall Street that when ducks are quacking, feed them, so Circle really accelerated the timeline of a lot of crypto companies waiting to go public,” he added.
Peter Thiel-backed crypto exchange company Bullish is next in the pipeline, and raised the size of its IPO on Monday, suggesting a $5 billion valuation.
Kennedy said there are plenty of other crypto companies that could follow with offerings, including Grayscale and Gemini, which have both filed for offerings, as well as Kraken, which is rumored to be considering an IPO, and Ripple. “There are several names we are watching out for,” he said.
The fintech resurgence in IPOs extends beyond crypto, with “buy now, pay later” company Klarna expected to move ahead with its IPO in the fall after multiple delays. “They seem pretty definitive about that timing,” Kennedy said.
Other delayed IPOs are planning to test the market now, too, such as StubHub, which is now poised for a September deal.
Coreweave, which reports earnings later this week, has come down from its post-IPO peak, but is still sitting on a 250% gain since its deal. Kennedy said that as with crypto, there are plenty of pre-IPO AI companies waiting for their moment, and that could serve as further momentum for the IPO market activity. He said the current environment, in which AI companies just need to declare themselves open for business to get a billion-dollar valuation is “just crazy,” but he added that it will be a “good thing in the long run” for a sustained flow of IPOs in the years ahead.
While Kennedy said an OpenAI IPO might not arrive until 2028-2029, there are more than just the biggest-name companies going public that have an AI theme embedded in their business, such as design firm Figma and medtech company Heartflow. These are not AI companies building large language models, but companies where AI is integrated into everything they do, he said.
Watch the video above to learn more about the IPO rebound and what could come next.
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