Goodbye to Wall Street? OpenAI, Stripe or SpaceX prefer not to go public

At the end of November, SoftBank sold its entire stake in Nvidia. The operation, valued at more than $6 billion, coincided with a new round of investment in OpenAI, in which the Japanese group increased its exposure. Neither of the two companies, neither Nvidia nor OpenAI, is immune to the prominence in the market. But only one of them is listed on the stock market.

The other, OpenAI, continues to operate as a private company and has reached a valuation of more than $300 billion. not listed on any regulated market. And it is not an isolated case.

Neither do ByteDance, SpaceX or Stripe. The first, owner of TikTok, dominates the short video market on a global scale and maintains sustained growth without listing. The second, led by Elon Musk, concentrates most of the world’s private space launches. The third manages digital payment infrastructures in more than 40 countries and moves volumes that exceed hundreds of billions each year.

All of them, along with OpenAI, remain outside the stock market. And for now there are no clear signs that that will change. Instead of resorting to an IPO, continue to secure financing through private funds and strategic agreements.

For years, going public was the moment that marked the transition from startup to large company. Today, that step is postponed or discarded, even in companies that are already valued in tens of billions.

In April of this year, Anthropic raised $4 billion in an expansion led by Amazon. In that same month, OpenAI closed financing agreements for more than 7,000 million, with the participation of funds such as Thrive Capital and Sequoia. Stripe, one of the payment processing giants, has exceeded the valuation of 65,000 million without ever having carried out an IPO. Databricks, specialized in data intelligence, is around 43 billion. They all operate with private capital.

This change does not only affect companies. It also modifies the place that the stock market occupies in the distribution of capital. In sectors such as technology, some of the leading companies of the moment are financing their growth without resorting to the public stock market. As if the bag had stopped fulfilling its original function.

According to data from PitchBook, the volume of IPOs in the digital sector has fallen 70% since 2021. The interest in listing has not disappeared, but it is no longer a priority. Above all, for companies that can afford to continue growing without exposing themselves.

The reasons go beyond the situation. Neither inflation nor interest rates alone explain this change. What has happened is that conditions have changed. There is private liquidity, there are funds willing to enter without demanding immediate profitability, and there is a new generation of companies that prefer to operate autonomously rather than open to the public.

The advantages are numerous. Operating as a private company allows them to avoid quarterly results pressure, protect their innovation roadmap, keep control in the hands of the founding team, and avoid market volatility. All of them, great advantages over its competitors that do list.

Access restricted to small investors

This shift of growth towards private circuits has consequences in terms of access to investment. For decades, stock markets offered retail investors the ability to participate in intermediate or final phases of the development of technological companies. Currently, many of these expansion stages take place outside the open market.

The possibility of entering in early phases, as happened at the time with Amazon, Apple or Google, is no longer on the table. When these companies went public, there was still a long way to go. Today, if any of the new technology companies decides to take that step, much of the value will already be reflected on the label.

And what is more relevant, a good part of the growth will have already been absorbed by those who agreed earlier. That is one of the big differences of this new cycle. It’s not just that there are fewer IPOs or IPOs. It’s about the fact that those who arrive arrive late.

According to PitchBook, the total volume of capital managed by investment firms private equity and venture capital exceeded $3.5 trillion in 2024. These funds not only provide financing, but also influence the strategic decisions, governance structure, and expansion schedule of startups.

This type of financing allows many companies to continue operating and growing without the need to carry out a public offering of shares. In some way, the private equity industry is gaining weight and, in part, displacing the role that the stock market traditionally occupied as the main way to channel investment towards innovation.