AI mega-IPOs are concentrating venture capital returns even more

In short: A wave of very large AI-related stock market listings is making venture capital look even more like a business where a few big wins matter more than everything else.

What's going on

Venture capital, or VC (money invested in young companies that are still growing), has long worked like a lottery. A small number of investments usually bring in most of the profits.

The Financial Times says the AI boom is pushing this pattern to an extreme because several huge companies are heading toward public markets. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, is expected by its investors to reach a $2 trillion valuation when it goes public in the coming weeks. The column also points to SpaceX trading at about $2 trillion after its IPO in June, and OpenAI considering a private fundraise at $1.2 trillion ahead of a possible listing next year.

To show how unusual this is, the column compares those numbers with decades of tech IPOs. From 1980 to 2025, 3,365 tech companies went public with a combined value of $4.1 trillion at the start of trading, based on data compiled by finance professor Jay Ritter.

At the same time, many private tech companies are stuck. PitchBook estimates today’s private “unicorns” (companies valued at over $1 billion) add up to $5.3 trillion, but higher interest rates since late 2021 have made it harder for many of them to go public without taking a lower price.

What to watch

New money flowing into VC funds has slowed since 2021, even as AI investment surged. The exception is a small group of big firms raising very large funds, which could increase pressure on investors to get access to those “winner” funds. Over time, the gains from AI could spread to more start-ups, but for now the biggest payouts appear to be concentrated at the top.

Source: Financial Times