US IPO Rebound Does Little to Dent Private Markets’ Rapid Growth

Investment bankers are cheering the recovery in US first-time stock sales. But the revival comes too late to halt a decades-long slump in the number of public companies amid the unchecked growth of private markets.

The number of American public companies stood at around 4,000 last year, around half the number there were in 1996, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report. On the sidelines are nearly 800 closely held US companies valued at more than $1 billion apiece, including three mega-unicorns — SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI — each valued at over $100 billion, BI’s report showed.

The uptick ...