2026 Is The Biggest IPO Year In History. But Take Out SpaceX And Right Now It’s One of the Worst.

Twenty twenty-six is the biggest IPO year on record, but SaaStr reports that's largely because of SpaceX. The rocket company raised more than seventy-five billion dollars when it went public in June at a one point seven-seven trillion dollar valuation—the largest IPO ever executed. Exclude SpaceX, and the other forty-three venture-backed IPOs this year are worth only about seventeen billion dollars combined. That's a normal year, at best. The aftermath has been uglier still. SpaceX is down roughly thirty percent from its debut; many hot IPOs have dropped far more steeply. Per SaaStr, public investors are now pricing in a specific fear: that artificial intelligence will displace entire categories of software. SaaS companies like Figma and Salesforce—which had strong growth—have crashed eighty-five percent or more from their peaks. But infrastructure companies whose products AI actually consumes more of, like Datadog and Snowflake, are setting records. The market isn't re-pricing SaaS. It's sorting it—determining which software becomes more essential in an AI world, and which becomes less.

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