AI Fuels M&A Machine

Good morning. The market is still waiting for AI frontier developers to go public. Imagine what the prospect for an IPO looks like if your company isn’t OpenAI or Anthropic.

As The Morning Download reported last week, U.S. venture dealmaking hit $515.8 billion through the third quarter of 2026, but exits remain stalled. The PitchBook NVCA Venture Monitor shows that just 18 companies went public in the third quarter, leaving 992 active unicorns and a backlog of IPOs with no clear path to liquidity.

Please use the alternative exit. The M&A door is open.

The M&A door is likely to remain open. As PitchBook noted, the backlog of companies that need to or should have gone public by now could account for more than two full years of IPOs.

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Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute’s new Executive Resilience series, where she’s profiling America’s top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

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