The IPO Window Is Open. Are You Actually Ready?

Every year or so, someone publishes a piece asking whether the IPO window is open, and every year, the finance community collectively holds its breath waiting for the answer. This year, PwC’s U.S. IPO services leader Mike Bellin gave Crunchbase News a masterclass on what’s really going on Buried in his expert opinion is something worth pulling out and putting on a billboard:

The companies that win in this market aren’t the ones who time the window. They’re the ones who are already ready when it opens.

I know. Groundbreaking stuff. But hear me out, because the specifics here matter a lot, especially if you’re a CFO or controller at a high-growth company thinking about what the next two years look like.

“Companies are no longer asking ‘when is the window?’ They’re asking, ‘Are we ready when the window opens?’ That’s a meaningful evolution.” — Mike Bellin, PwC

That’s the clearest articulation I’ve seen in a while of something the best finance and accounting leaders have known for years: a successful IPO is the result of a long, deliberate build — not a sprint to start when the market calls your number. The companies that priced successfully in 2025 had invested 18 to 24 months in advance in governance upgrades, financial reporting infrastructure, and refinement of their equity story.

Eighteen to twenty-four months is not a last-minute checklist. That’s a commitment.

Why 2026 Started Slowly (And Why That Doesn’t Matter As Much As You Think)

The market’s slow start this year has two explanations, and only one of them is interesting. The boring one: the 2025 government shutdown created an SEC backlog of over 900 registration statements. Stuff got delayed, and companies recalibrated timelines. Classic bureaucratic hangover.

The more interesting explanation is structural: companies with access to deep pools of private capital are simply choosing to wait. Not because they’re scared, but because they can. The secondary market hit over $60 billion in transaction volume in 2025, which means founders and employees are getting liquidity without forcing the company to the public markets on someone else’s timeline.

By the numbers:

• $60B+ in secondary market volume in 2025
• 800+ unicorns in the IPO-ready backlog entering 2026 — the largest in a decade
• Median time to IPO for 2025 listings: 11+ years — the longest on record

Here’s the thing about patient capital, though: it buys you time, but it doesn’t buy you readiness. If you’re using your extended runway to binge watch The Pitt (or, ya know, building the business) instead of building out your financial infrastructure, you’re going to have a very bad time when you actually need to move fast.

Profitability Is the New Black. Credibility Is the New Profitability.

Let’s talk about what investors actually want right now, because the 2021 playbook is dead and we should probably stop pretending otherwise.

The era of growth multiples untethered from near-term fundamentals is over. Institutional investors in 2026 are paying a premium for scaled, cash-generative stories with clear paths to profitability. Bellin calls out the “Rule of 40” — the idea that your revenue growth rate plus your profit margin should exceed 40% — as having re-emerged as a baseline screening metric. He suggests it may now be a “Rule of 60” for companies that want top-tier valuations.

But here’s what I think is the most underrated part of the whole interview:

GAAP profitability at the IPO date is not required. A credible, time-bound roadmap to it absolutely is.

That’s a nuance worth sitting with. You don’t have to be profitable yet. You have to be able to tell a believable story about when and how you will be profitable that’s backed by improving unit economics, not just optimistic projections. Improving gross margins, declining customer acquisition costs as a percentage of revenue, expanding net dollar retention — these are the numbers that get scrutinized.

THE READINESS REALITY CHECK‍

Bellin is explicit: investors who receive GAAP financials presented clearly and transparently (rather than buried under non-GAAP adjustments) develop more durable institutional trust. The companies that try to paper over weak fundamentals with creative accounting aren’t fooling anyone. They’re just delaying the reckoning.

And then there’s this: governance maturity, financial reporting infrastructure, and a polished equity story are described as “table stakes” — equal in importance to your top-line numbers. If your close process is a dumpster fire and your reporting takes three weeks, that’s just as much an operational problem as a valuation one.

The Secondaries Boom: A Feature, Not a Bug (With One Caveat)

I want to spend a minute on secondaries because I think the framing matters. For a long time, insider selling before an IPO carried a whiff of “get out while you can.” That stigma is pretty much gone. What was once a distress signal has been normalized as a sophisticated liquidity tool, and for good reason.

Secondary programs serve legitimate purposes. Founders who are a decade into building their company have reasonable personal financial planning needs. Employees who joined years ago expecting a liquidity event need a release valve. Companies get the benefit of valuation discovery in a more forgiving private setting before the full scrutiny of the public markets.

All of that is real and valid.

Bellin’s caution — and I think it’s the right one — is that secondary access shouldn’t become a reason to indefinitely postpone the discipline of getting ready for public markets. Extended private holding periods delay price discovery, compress LP distributions, and ultimately reduce the competitive tension that keeps acquisition valuations high.

Patient capital gives you more runway. What you do with that runway is what separates the companies that are eventually compelling from the ones that are eventually acquired at a discount.

The leaders I respect are using the extended private timeline to get their house in order — building the accounting infrastructure, controls, and reporting capabilities that institutional investors now expect to see on day one. Sure, there’s an IPO on the horizon, but operating with public-market rigor makes you a better company regardless of when you go public.

On AI: The Premium Is Real, But So Is the Scrutiny

I’d be remiss not to address the AI angle, partly because it’s relevant and partly because I have opinions.

Bellin identifies AI-enabled software as a top investor preference heading into the rest of 2026, but the AI premium is no longer automatic. Investors want to see that AI is genuinely embedded in the product, that net dollar retention is strong, and that the path to margin expansion is credible. High switching costs and essential utility are commanding the best multiples.

In other words, slapping “AI-powered” on your marketing deck and calling it a day isn’t going to cut it. The companies winning investor confidence are the ones where AI is woven into the product in ways that make customers more efficient, more accurate, and deeply reluctant to leave.

That description resonates with how we think about our own platform. But more broadly, it applies to the finance and accounting functions: the teams that are going to look best in front of institutional investors are the ones using modern tools that make their close faster, their reporting cleaner, and their controls airtight. Sure, it looks good on a pitch deck, but the underlying fundamentals actually are better.

I’m not going to tell you the IPO market is wide open. It’s not, at least not yet. But the underlying fundamentals are strong, the backlog is large, and Bellin is cautiously optimistic that activity accelerates as macro visibility improves and the SEC clears its backlog.

What I will tell you is this: the companies that are going to price well when that window fully opens are the ones that started preparing 18 to 24 months ago. If you’re reading this and thinking, “we haven’t really started,” that’s not a reason to panic. But it is a reason to start today rather than next quarter.

Readiness is a discipline you build into your finance team's operations every single day. The good news is that the tools and processes to do that exist. The less good news is that they don’t build themselves.

Shoutout to Mary Ann Azevedo for the excellent piece.

— Mike Whitmire, Co-Founder & CEO, FloQast