IPO planning: CFOs must learn the power of a thoughtful pause

Here’s a fun challenge. We’re going to write a whole article about the IPO market in 2026, and we’re only going to write the word “SpaceX” one time. And there it goes. We already used it.

While banner names—which for reasons stated above we, uhh, can’t actually write again—may get all the attention, their existence shouldn’t dominate the story.

“Any one of the potential hyper jumbo IPOs that are rumored to be out there…any one of them could have gone public in any market,” Mark Schwartz, EY’s IPO and SPAC advisory leader, told CFO Brew.

“The fact that they’re all thinking about coming public now is a reflection of two things. One is, the benefits of being a public company have never gone away. And two is, the feeling around the IPO market is finally at a point where companies like that are not just contemplating, but are actively pursuing the public markets.”

But what about the IPO market for…everyone else? We know you skip the “on the previous episode” feature on HBO, but this time around it’s actually required, because to understand the state of 2026 you’ve got to look back a few years. Here’s what CFOs need to know about the IPO market of yesterday (and tomorrow).

Recent history. It wasn’t that long ago that the so-called IPO drought could easily keep even the most inner peace-y of CFOs up at night. But even if recent years haven’t stood out as exceptionally inviting and active periods for IPOs (and were maybe something like the opposite), they weren’t necessarily totally catastrophic, either.

“Look at every chart. What it basically looks like is things kind of slowly grew from 2010 to 2019,” Angela Lee, a professor of venture capital at Columbia Business School and the founder of investment network 37 Angels, told us back in 2024.

“We all collectively went insane in 2020 and 2021. And then we corrected in 2022 and 2023, and things look a whole lot like 2019 right now—which is in no way, shape, or form a catastrophic market.”

In any case, the relative drought of the first couple of post-pandemic years turned all eyes to 2024, which, according to Mike Bellin, PwC’s US IPO services leader, offered “some glimmers of hope.”

That held true for a time. “We felt like the momentum was building every quarter of 2025,” he told us. “Then we hit Q4, when the government shut down. The SEC shut down, [which] resulted in many companies hitting the pause button on their IPO processes.”

But that didn’t necessarily spook companies that had been preparing to go public. “What it did is it delayed them, hopefully into 2026,” Bellin explained. “When we came into 2026 it was the strongest IPO pipeline that I’ve seen since the 2021 boom.”

Schwartz sees things similarly. “Everybody looked toward this year as potentially a breakout year,” he said. “Q1 was good, continued the trajectory [of the last couple of years]. But then, of course, we went into some geopolitical tensions.”

Said Bellin, “When the VIX, or the volatility index, sometimes known as the Fear Index, spikes, it's really difficult to price IPOs, to take IPOs to market, given the volatility in the market.”

“Even when we hit the rough patch and a whole bunch of uncertainty came into the market, we really didn’t have companies taking their foot off the IPO readiness gas pedal,” Schwartz added. Instead, the conversation became about finding the right time to go public, not whether they would at all, he said of his clients.

We’re so back? But what do you get when you pair a pent-up pipeline of companies wanting to go public with even more companies waiting out uncertainty? The back half of 2026.

“I do think there is a logjam currently, given the volume of the unicorns, the volume of companies that wanted to go in ’25 and with the shutdown couldn’t go,” Bellin said. “I don’t think the question is whether those companies can go public or are ready to be public. It’s more [about] whether the window in Q2 and Q3 can absorb the volume. If you have 15 to 20 companies all trying to price in October, November, you’re going to see some deals get crowded out. The timing and the sequencing will be everything for companies going forward here.”

And those big names that we can’t name complicate the picture as well.

“The potential for some never-seen-before offering size IPOs to hit the market means that companies are going to need to be extra flexible in order to not be in the market in or around some of these transactions,” Schwartz said, which might mean either pulling deals forward or putting them off.

Thoughtful pause. But rather than twiddle their thumbs or impatiently tap their feet, CFOs should use the wait-and-see period to “test the waters” by talking to investors and “stress test[ing] their equity story,” Bellin said.

“The best CFOs, when it comes to the IPO, they’ve already tested their equity story. They’ve stress tested the metrics, the KPIs, some of the non-GAAP metrics, with potential buy side investors, and that’s key,” he explained. “The SEC is going to scrutinize them when they go through the IPO process. But I think the key is having investors who understand your business, the growth prospects, and how the metrics and KPIs play into your growth and your valuation. That’s where successful CFOs start their process.”

And the potential pause in IPO activity gives CFOs time to set up their operations for success post-IPO.

“The IPO is a milestone. It’s when the fun really starts,” Bellin continued. “The best companies that perform as public companies started their journey 18 to 24 months in advance of that IPO. They’ve thought about the people, the process, the systems within their organization.”

Thus, when it’s time to actually go public, “the muscle memory is there,” he added. “We’re seeing really good things happen while the market has been shut or quieter.”