Half the Market Is on Strike

Welcome to Second Opinion, our monthly review. Each month we take the main events in public and private markets, test them against our own secondary-market data, and look at them through a secondary investor’s lens.

September brought us no AI IPO, but a run of IPO postponements. In the private market, money kept pouring in at record valuations, but almost none is coming back out. The private secondary market is increasingly bifurcated: in Q3, fewer than 1 in 5 actively listed companies had real interest on both sides.

Public markets: a month of postponements

SpaceX’s record IPO did not reopen the window. Only 18 companies went public in Q3, 12 of them in healthcare. September then became a month of postponements and withdrawals: Renaissance Capital counted 7 postponed or pulled IPOs in Q3, up from 4 in Q2 and 3 in Q1.

• Motive — withdrew its public S-1
• ŌURA — postponed its IPO, citing “uncertainty in the IPO market” despite reporting strong investor demand
• Anthropic — pushed an expected October debut to November, aiming to trade before Thanksgiving
• SB Energy — the SoftBank subsidiary that builds AI data centers delayed its IPO; valuation was a sticking point in early investor meetings
• Holtec — postponed a $900M deal the night before pricing
• OpenAI — biding its time: in talks for a new private round of at least $30B at a $1.4T valuation, meant to last until a 2027 IPO

The common thread is price. Public investors are pushing back on private valuations, and companies with other funding options would rather wait than list at a discount.

Track where each pending listing stands on our IPO Barometer.

Private capital: record in, little out

US venture investment hit a record $515.8B through Q3, about 44% above 2021’s full-year record, with AI taking 82.7%, according to PitchBook’s Q3 2026 Venture Monitor.

But PitchBook describes the exit side of the market as seizing up. The delayed mega-IPOs are the bottleneck: while the market waits for them, other listings stall and little cash flows back to LPs. Net cash flow to LPs has been negative by $202B since 2022, and 992 active unicorns, worth a combined $5.7T, have no clear path to liquidity.

Primary rounds in September still looked impressive, and more are coming.

Valuations as reported and announced, September 2026. ≥ = at least, ~ = about.

Secondary market: buyers here, sellers there

The split deepened in Q3: only 17.6% of actively listed companies had real interest on both sides, down from 27.3% in Q1. New listings made it worse, with 73% of companies that became active in Q3 arriving with sellers and few buyers. And once buyers leave a name, they rarely come back: 78% of Q2’s ask-heavy names were still ask-heavy in Q3.

We count a company as active in a quarter when it has at least 5 orders and at least $1M of listed volume, so a single stray or tiny order can’t make a book look one-sided. A company is two-sided when bids are 20–80% of its listed volume; above 80% it is bid-heavy, below 20% ask-heavy.

By dollars the picture is steadier: two-sided names held 43% of listed volume in Q3, about the same as in Q1, because the largest names tend to have buyers and sellers.

Ranked by bid volume, bid share and bid depth in Q3 2026. Source: LBX Pro.

Activity by sector

Listed volume nearly doubled in Q3, up 87% from Q2, and AI plus AI infrastructure took 31% of it. But the growth came mostly from the sell side: across all sectors, bids were only a third of listed volume.

• AI infrastructure: volume rose 170%, but bids fell to 20% of it from 32% in Q2. Holders are listing into the boom faster than buyers arrive.
• Payments: the most buyer-heavy large sector, with bids at 73% of volume, driven by names like Stripe and Ramp.
• SaaS and FinTech: volume more than doubled, yet bids were just 18% and 17%. This is supply looking for buyers.
• Crypto: the only large sector to shrink in Q3 (down 5%), with bids at just 7% of volume.
• SpaceTech: volume fell about 75% from Q1 to Q3, after SpaceX went public in June and left the private pool.

Source: LBX Pro listed volume.

See which names are moving now in the October activity ranking.