Three Companies Are About to Outweigh 25 Years of Tech History

Here's a number worth sitting with: the pending public offerings from SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are on track to generate more value than every U.S. venture-backed tech exit combined since the year 2000. That's not a stray claim from an enthusiastic analyst — it comes from the NCVA-Pitchbook Venture Monitor report released Wednesday, and the math behind it holds up.

Start with what's already happened. SpaceX has completed its move into public markets at a valuation of $1.77 trillion. Anthropic and OpenAI haven't priced their IPOs yet, but both are being discussed in the trillions of dollars. Add the three together and you're likely looking at a combined figure north of $4 trillion. For context, the SEC tallied just $70 billion in total U.S. IPO proceeds last year. Three companies are about to dwarf an entire year of public offerings by a factor of dozens.

To put that quarter-century comparison in perspective, consider what it's actually up against. Since 2000, U.S. venture-backed exits have included Google's 2004 IPO, Tesla's in 2010, and Meta's in 2012 — three companies that now rank among the most valuable on Earth. That same stretch saw LinkedIn, Slack, and WhatsApp each acquired for more than $20 billion. Uber's 2019 IPO, at $84 billion, felt enormous at the time. It amounts to less than 5% of what SpaceX alone just pulled off. According to the Venture Monitor report, stack every one of those deals on top of each other and the SpaceX-Anthropic-OpenAI trio still comes out ahead.

The fine print matters

A few caveats keep this from being a completely clean comparison. The tally excludes major non-U.S. companies, so something like Alibaba's exit doesn't factor in. It's also measuring "value created" rather than pure liquid cash raised, which is a meaningfully different thing — a trillion-dollar valuation isn't the same as a trillion dollars changing hands. And plenty of era-defining tech moments happened at companies that were already public by the time they occurred, so they never show up in IPO figures at all. The iPhone launch, Android's debut, and the rise of YouTube and Instagram all happened inside companies that had already made their public market debuts, meaning none of that value creation gets counted in this particular ledger.

Even with those caveats stripped in, the scale here is unusual enough that it's hard to argue the underlying point. Twenty-five years produced a genuinely eventful run for the venture-backed tech industry. Three companies going public in the same rough window are apparently on pace to outdo the whole thing.

Why this is happening now

Part of the explanation is structural. Companies are simply staying private much longer than they used to. Google, if it followed today's playbook, likely would have delayed its IPO for years and gone public at a far higher valuation than it did in 2004. Private capital has become deep enough, and patient enough, that founders no longer feel pressure to tap public markets early just to raise money or reward early investors.

The other driver is specific to this moment: the enormous cost of building and training frontier AI models. That capital intensity has pushed labs like Anthropic and OpenAI into a near-constant cycle of fundraising, each round bigger than the last, inflating valuations well beyond what a traditional software company would command at a similar stage. SpaceX's business, building and launching hardware at scale, has its own capital demands, but the AI labs in particular are burning cash in a way that keeps pulling more private money in and pushing valuations higher before they ever reach a public listing.

The result is a set of IPOs that aren't just large by historical standards — they're large enough to strain the market's ability to absorb them. The report notes that offerings of this size are already testing the limits of financial infrastructure built for a different scale of company. Underwriting, index inclusion, trading liquidity, all of it was designed around companies raising billions, not trillions.

What happens next is worth watching closely. If Anthropic and OpenAI do complete IPOs anywhere near the valuations currently being discussed, the comparison in the Venture Monitor report won't just be a striking historical footnote. It'll be a marker of how fundamentally the scale of tech capital has shifted in just the last few years, driven by a single technology that has convinced investors it's worth staying private, and raising astronomically, for as long as possible.