WHAT TO MAKE OF A HOT IPO MARKET

This year's crop of initial public offerings could be even dicier than usual because of a skew toward tech and crypto.

-  DAVID MILSTEAD

WITH stock markets hitting highs and a flood of new companies selling their shares to investors, it's easy to get FOMOIPO— fear of missing out on initial public offerings. But the fortunes of many of the debuts in this year's surge are tied to artificial intelligence or cryptocurrency, making the batch of new issues perhaps even riskier than the typical crop.

Through September 30, there were 161 U.S. IPOs, according to IPO research firm Renaissance Capital, compared with 150 for the entirety of 2024. Renaissance counted 64 IPOs in the third quarter, raising a combined $15.3 billion—the biggest quarter for new issuance since 2021.

One of 2025's top-performing IPOs has been CoreWeave, which operates a cloud platform for artificial intelligence computing. Priced at $40 per share at its March IPO, it closed out September at $137, giving it a market capitalization of $71 billion. Circle Internet Group, a trading platform for bitcoin and an issuer of a stablecoin (a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar), was priced at $31 in June and is now $133, giving it a market value of $30 billion. Both are unprofitable, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. (Prices, returns and other data are as of September 30, unless otherwise noted.)

“The IPO market tends to be a lot busier in periods when asset prices may be somewhat inflated, toward the top of a market cycle,” says Nick Einhorn, the director of research at Renaissance. The “danger,” he says, is that when the cycle turns, IPO stocks can fall sharply. IPOs have always been risky, because the companies are typically younger or less established than those already trading on the stock exchange, and IPOs don’t have a track record of delivering results to a broad shareholder base.