2025 was supposed to be the year many promising tech companies listed on public markets but volatility may limit IPOs.
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Recent stock market uncertainty, caused in part by the US administrations policies, is making it harder for startups to go ahead with planned stock market listings, representatives from the NYSE and Nasdaq told the audience at the GCVI Summit on Wednesday.
“Right now, there is incredibly high volatility and uncertainty. Those are the two words that spook markets, that spook investors,” said Erik Peña, head of market development at NYSE. While a number of companies are planning IPOs on both the NYSE and Nasdaq, these could end up being delayed if market turbulence continues.
“It’s arguable that we need at least a quarter of relative stability […] and that’s when the conditions should return back to more favourable ones for the IPO commits,” said Peña.
“What the buyers want to see is an end to the uncertainty,” agreed Jack Cassel, senior vice president at Nasdaq. “Any uncertainty will lead to a tighter IPO window but once we have more certainty on [US government] policy we will see lots of investors trying to generate IPOs,” he said, adding: “The fundamentals for companies have not changed.”
A series of shocks introduced uncertainty into the US stock market in the first quarter of 2025, including tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, the cutting of tech company valuations after the emergence of DeepSeek and a fall in consumer confidence. This has dampened investor hopes that the sluggish IPO market of recent years would finally start to pick up.
Cassel said that he is expecting up to four IPOs on the Nasdaq in the first two weeks of April but cautioned that this timeframe is contingent on market conditions not being disturbed further.
GCV this week published a list of expected IPOs over the coming months. Jeff Baglio, a partner at the law firm DLA Piper, told GCV that market volatility made the timing of the listings uncertain.
Cassel told the Summit audience that the expected March IPO of CoreWeave, a company that provides access to data centres and high-powered chips for AI workloads, will act as a bellwether for the strength of the market.
He added that investors are watching the performance of two companies that recently went public – Venture Global, which debuted in January, and SailPoint, in February. The reception for both has so far been muted. In their first weeks, SailPoint did not improve much on its debut price and Venture Global’s shares dipped below the IPO valuation.
Peña said that despite the uncertainty, the NYSE still has a large pipeline of planned IPOs.
“Despite that backdrop, we are planning for a very active Q2 and there’s a robust number of companies that are waiting to go out,” he said.
He also said that many of the companies listing were special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), shell companies that acquire or merge with an existing private company to allow them to go public without going through the standard IPO process. SPACs saw a burst of popularity in 2020 and 2021 but then saw their use dramatically decline after many achieved poor results.
“SPAC was a dirty word because questionable management teams […] used this to go public but had mixed or no outcome,” Peña said.
“But that [perception] has changed. In the year to date there have been about 60 IPOs. 25% of them, roughly, are SPACs. And it’s not stopping there. There’s a very robust pipeline of other SPACs that are coming.”
