You’ve postponed your IPO. Now what?

There’s a certain…Oura out there.

When biometric ring maker Oura postponed its planned IPO at the end of September, citing “uncertainty” in the market, to some, it was evidence of a larger trend in the 2026 IPO market: postponement is the name of the game.

The year thus far has ushered in a solid slate of IPOs, amounting to 118 deals with approximately $148.3 billion in proceeds in the US as of October 27, according to data from IPO specialist Renaissance Capital. (Those numbers are for IPOs at or above a $50 million market cap.)

Postponements are becoming noticeably prevalent as well: 13 companies have postponed their IPOs so far this year, including one sizable withdrawal in October, according to Renaissance Capital.

Matthew Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, told CFO Brew via email that the number of postponed or axed IPOs “doesn’t capture the far greater number of pre-IPO companies that had planned to go public, but never filed or launched due to market conditions.”

And then there’s the Anthropic of it all. The AI giant behind Claude, which unveiled its S-1 filing on October 26, has sucked up all the air in the IPO market, as its public debut is expected to reach a $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion valuation.

For many companies formerly considering listing this year, the question is no longer whether they can exit, but whether they need to do so quickly, Dean Quiambao, partner and technology industry leader at accounting firm Armanino, told CFO Brew.

So, hey. Let’s take a wild guess and assume that if you were ever planning to IPO this year, you’re suddenly…not. At least, not right now. What now? What do you do next?

Plenty more fish. It’s understandable why CFOs have been dissuaded from going public, Quiambao noted, and step one is analyzing which challenges held you back from entering the market now.

“The bars keep going higher,” he said. “The level of revenue that you have to have is higher now more than ever,” he said. The amount of revenue and margin growth “has to be higher than ever.”

Quiambao encouraged CFOs to first get honest about what they wanted from the IPO in the first place. “We could all run to the finish line of an IPO…There’s so few CFOs who have done it. Everybody wants to do it. It’s more important to do it right,” he added, noting there are “plenty of examples” of companies running to IPO only to find themselves unable to “live up to the valuation that they went public at.”

So, instead of viewing postponement as a failure, focus on strengthening the factors that make an IPO successful in the first place, considering that so many fizzle and fade anyway.

“It’s more important to build out your people, your process, your technology,” Quiambao said. “It’s more important to have numbers that you can forecast, that you can rely upon, and most importantly, hit quarter after quarter.”

“Do you have the relationships among your C-suite leadership team [so] you actually can work as a team, tell one story, go to market, hit numbers?” he continued. “Ultimately, if you can make that repeatable, that will increase your enterprise market value over time.”

Do hard things now. Even if a company’s planned timing for an offering is thrown off, the best CFOs will keep putting in the work.

“The best CFOs are always building…You should be doing all the hard things now while nobody’s looking,” Quiambao said. “I would be going through practice earnings calls. How fast can we close our books? How fast can we pivot our forecast, or our budget, or re-forecast?” he continued. “Start to act like a public company.”

And if the IPO market looks more enticing down the road, that legwork will allow you to seize future opportunities. “Don’t just say, ‘Oh, it’s not a good time and we’re just going to sit and wait and see what the board says,’” he said. “That’s a bigger challenge.”

After all, no one has a crystal ball, and it’s unclear when (or if) the market will look more inviting anytime soon.

“Let’s see the next big two of the big three get public. That’ll be very, very helpful, and will set the tone. That tide can raise all boats, and so it’ll be interesting to see how they’re received, how they operate,” Quiambao said. “Markets change fast. All of that uncertainty and volatility that we’re all so used to, it came really fast, so it can clear up really fast.”