• Market ructions complicate application of investor feedback on valuations
• Holtec, Bamboo among upcoming listings already throwing in the towel
• Anthropic’s listing sets up high-stakes finish as AI bull trade questioned

In just a few weeks, the global IPO market has been transformed from one where dealmakers were expecting a healthy 4Q26 to one where issuers are kicking the can into 2027.

Oura Health and Airtel Mobile were the first IPOs set to test increasingly scrutinous investors in a time of increasing turbulence, given rapidly rising sovereign bond yields.

But last week Oura decided to postpone its IPO, citing market “uncertainty”. Several market participants speaking to ECM Pulse suggested the issuer was too aggressive on price.

“Oura was just pushed too hard and given this market that’s why investors I think rejected it,” said an ECM banker.

By contrast, Airtel Mobile is going ahead. But the issuer and its banks have chosen a deliberately conservative structure, at a generous price, to give the deal every chance of being a success.

Perhaps it’s ungenerous to suggest Oura fumbled the ball by comparison. The speed of the rise in sovereign bond yields has caught many off guard. Months of feedback from investor meetings identifying levels where a deal may have worked before are essentially irrelevant.

For issuers to come to market now, they must swallow a bigger discount and price the deal at levels generous enough to make the buyside forget the turbulence.

“This is an extraordinary market, and we are in constant contact with prospective issuers on timings and how to navigate,” noted a second banker. “Block trades are working well on the right day, particularly primary raises for M&A, as are convertibles still. But the product that is being hit hardest by this is IPOs.”

This is a very different market form earlier in 2026.

Source: Dealogic

While headline stock markets still look healthy, almost all market alpha has been accumulated among large-cap technology sticks. Index numbers, particularly in the US, are hiding a lot of pain outside of mega caps, the first banker noted.

This is often hard to explain to clients, but investor pain is growing.

“Both our public and private market investments are being affected by the higher interest rate regime and macroeconomics,” noted an investor. “The impact extends well beyond individual asset classes, creating broader knock-on effects throughout the financial system.”

“It makes IPOs a lot trickier when investors have safer places to park their money.”

Alongside Oura, a swathe of other US IPOs have been put on ice, including several high-profile deals like nuclear power business Holtec and CVC-backed insurance business Bamboo.

More postponements are seen as inevitable by market participants who are now anticipating a far quieter fourth quarter than they had hoped for.

“This is not the worst-case scenario, simply because the worst-case scenario is a significant market correction, which we haven’t had,” noted an ECM advisor. But IPO delays tell us market participants are “very worried” about such a correction still being around the corner, he added.

Bull market hangs on AI trade

With rising yields denting previously bullish sentiment over future corporate earnings, the sole driver of this equity bull market now is the buildout of global, and particularly US, AI infrastructure and capabilities.

But this story is far from as simple as it appeared at the beginning of the year. The industry leadership of US AI hyperscalers is now coming under commercial threat from cheaper open source LLMs and many of their clients seeking to build local AI infrastructure to safeguard intellectual property representing their data moats.

“If it weren’t for AI-driven earnings growth, we would be in a far worse place,” said the first banker. “So, if you are not connected to that story, everything is going to be a lot harder.

“That debate over AI ROI is going on now for some time and it feels like we are just at the beginning of this – six months is a lifetime in this sector and things are changing so fast.”

Into this complicated picture is set to ride Anthropic, like a hero upon a white horse set to save the final quarter of global IPO issuance.

However, Anthropic is also far from a clean equity story. While parallels might be drawn with SpaceX given the gargantuan size of the transaction and the fame of the name, this feels a very different deal.

Anthropic and its fellow hyperscaler OpenAI, an IPO candidate for 2027, are uniquely exposed to the competitive pressures growing in the industry. They are also at the forefront of a debate over AI safety and its overall risk to humanity, following several high-profile hacking incidents.

Trying to price a potential USD 100bn IPO isn’t easy. And while bankers and sell side advisors speaking to ECM Pulse this week were ubiquitous in their assessment that Anthropic can still go ahead in this market, buyside nerves are growing given the recent press.

“It’s funny. The bankers are all super excited – I was just speaking to a head of syndicate in the US, and they all say there is so much demand for Anthropic, but I don’t know,” said a second investor. “As an investor I don’t think it straightforward given the yield environment and news flow around Anthropic itself.

“There is huge competition from open-source LLMs and local AI infrastructure, OpenAI raised money at a lower valuation than USD 2tn, and there are all the politics between China and the US.”

The stakes for 4Q couldn’t be higher.