THE AI & TECH IPO WAVE:
WHO WENT PUBLIC & WHAT'S NEXT

After a brutal 2022–2023 IPO drought that left unicorns stuck in private-market purgatory, the floodgates are open again. The AI boom, recovering market sentiment, and a backlog of companies that have been waiting years to go public have combined to produce one of the more interesting tech IPO waves in recent memory.

Sage is breaking down the biggest public market debuts — what the companies do, what the valuations signal, and what they mean if you're someone who builds with or on top of tech.

THE BIG DEBUTS: WHO WENT PUBLIC

THE WATCHLIST: WHO'S STILL WAITING

Plenty of high-profile names are still in the on-deck circle. Some have been waiting so long they've become a meme at this point. Here's what Sage is watching:

WHAT THE IPO WAVE ACTUALLY SIGNALS

Beyond the individual company stories, the IPO wave tells a broader story about where tech is right now.

AI infrastructure is investable at scale. CoreWeave going public — and being valued by public markets on its own terms — confirmed that the GPU cloud infrastructure layer is a real business, not just a venture-backed science project. That's a green light for more infrastructure IPOs and more investment into compute capacity.

The AI efficiency story is a double-edged sword. Klarna's story — using AI to do more with fewer people — played well with investors but landed differently with employees and the public. As more companies bring AI-first efficiency narratives to their S-1s, expect more scrutiny of what that actually means for workforces. The companies that thread this needle well (cost savings + responsible transition) will have a better time in the public markets than those that just weaponize the efficiency angle.

Data is the new oil, for real this time. Reddit's valuation case partly rests on its data licensing business. Every company that sits on a unique corpus of human-generated content is now thinking about whether they have a data licensing play. Publishing companies, forums, social platforms, niche community sites — if you have years of human conversation, someone in an AI lab wants to talk to you.

The valuation reset is mostly over. The 2022 down rounds were brutal but necessary. Companies that survived (and some didn't) came out leaner, with clearer revenue models and more defensible unit economics. The IPO window reopening with solid, if not spectacular, debuts suggests public market investors are willing to reward AI-era businesses that can show a real path to profitability — not just hockey stick projections.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR BUILDERS

If you build products, these IPO stories have practical implications beyond "interesting market news."

The compute infrastructure layer is maturing and commoditizing — which is good for builders. When CoreWeave, AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure are all competing for AI compute customers, prices come down and reliability goes up. That makes building on top of these platforms less risky than it was two years ago.

Data moats are being priced in. If your product generates unique, high-quality data as a byproduct of users doing something useful, that data has strategic value you probably haven't fully accounted for. Think about what you're collecting and whether it's an asset.

Public markets are starting to understand AI business models. That's good news if you're building an AI-first company and thinking about exits. The vocabulary — inference costs, context windows, RAG pipelines, agent loops — is becoming language that investors and analysts can evaluate rather than hand-wave past.