What happened
A new report from the NCVA and Pitchbook highlights an incredible concentration of market value. As detailed by TechCrunch AI, the recent SpaceX IPO and pending exits from Anthropic and OpenAI will likely generate more value than all US venture-backed exits since 2000 combined. SpaceX has already gone public at a $1.77 trillion valuation. The trio together is projected to land somewhere north of $4 trillion, dwarfing the IPOs of Google, Tesla, and Meta.
How the room's reading it
Market watchers see this as the result of two major trends. First, companies are staying private for much longer, accumulating massive valuations before they hit public markets — the Google of 2004 would probably have delayed its IPO. Second, the sheer capital required for training foundation models has pushed labs into intense, valuation-inflating fundraising rounds. Some analysts point to caveats in the report's language. It measures "value created" not just liquid cash, and excludes major non-US exits. Still, the consensus is that the scale of these offerings is unlike anything the tech industry has seen before.
Sailfish's take
These aren't just big numbers on a screen — they represent a new centre of gravity. We see the downstream effects every day. Talent acquisition is harder, as the top labs can outbid almost anyone. Compute is a political resource, allocated by a handful of giants. For builders, this means the old playbook of raising a seed round to chase a novel idea is becoming much harder, especially in foundation model research. We think the smart move isn't to compete on their turf. The real opportunity is building nimble applications on their platforms, or finding the valuable problems their scale makes them too slow to solve.