Brendan Blumer, Chairman of of Bullish and Tom Farley, CEO of Bullish, Bullish a cryptocurrency exchange operator, pose with staffs during the company’s IPO at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., August 13, 2025.

NYSE

The Bullish IPO this week took on added significance, perhaps because of the company name.

When shares of the Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange more than doubled out of the gate on Wednesday before finishing the day up 84%, it was the latest sign that the tech IPO bulls are back in business.

In July, design software vendor Figma more than tripled in its New York Stock Exchange debut, and a month earlier shares of crypto firm Circle soared 168% in their first day on the Big Board.

Wall Street has been waiting a long time for this.

Three years ago, steep inflation and soaring interest effectively closed the market for public offerings. Tech stocks tanked and private capital dried up, forcing cash-burning startups to turn their attention away from growth and toward efficiency and profitability.

The roadblock appeared to be loosening earlier this year, when companies like StubHub and Klarna filed their prospectuses, but then President Donald Trump roiled the markets in April with his plans for sweeping tariffs. Roadshows were put on indefinite hold.

The president’s tariff agenda has since stabilized a bit, and investor money is pouring into tech, pushing the Nasdaq to record levels, up more than 40% from this year’s low in April. Optimism is growing that the hefty backlog of high-valued startups will continue to clear as CEOs and venture capitalists gain confidence that the public markets will welcome their top-tier companies.

Ahead of Figma’s debut, NYSE president Lynn Martin told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that immense demand for that offering could “open the floodgates” for the rest of the market. And earlier this week, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman told “Fast Money” that there’s a “very healthy list” of companies looking to IPO in the second half of this year, ahead of the holiday season.

“I’ve been meeting a lot of CEOs, getting them prepared to think about what they want in the public markets and where they’re going,” Friedman said.

There are more than two-dozen venture-backed U.S. tech companies valued at $10 billion or more, according to CB Insights. StubHub has updated its prospectus, suggesting an offering is coming soon.

“The IPO window is open,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark, in an interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell” this week. “You’ve seen across industry, broad-based support for IPOs, and therefore, we’re advising companies we’re investing in to get ready and go public.”

Another big topic among VCs and bankers is the regulatory environment.

The Biden administration took heat from startup investors for cracking down on big acquisitions, mostly attributable to Lina Khan’s perceived heavy hand at the Federal Trade Commission, while also failing to ease restrictions that they say make it less appealing for companies to go public than to stay private.

Paul Atkins, the new head of the SEC, said in July he wants to “make IPOs great again,” by removing some of the impediments around the complexity of disclosures and litigation risk. He hasn’t offered many specific recommendations.

Friedman told CNBC that the first conversation she had with Atkins after he took the job was about making it easier and more attractive for companies to go public.

“The conversation was constructive along many fronts, looking at disclosure requirements, the proxy process, other things that really make it harder for companies to be public and navigate the public markets,” Friedman said. “He’s as interested as we are, so hopefully we’ll turn that into great action.”

In addition to the big gains notched by Bullish, Figma and Circle, the public markets welcomed online banking provider Chime with a 37% gain last month and trading app eToro with a 29% pop in May. The health-tech market has seen two IPOs: Hinge Health and Omada Health.

But it was the roaring debuts of Circle and Figma that sparked chatter of a new bull market for IPOs. Figma jumped 250% on IPO day after pricing shares a dollar ahead of an updated range. Circle’s value more than doubled after the stablecoin issuer also priced above the expected range.

Figma celebrates its initial public offering at the New York Stock Exchange on July 31, 2025.

NYSE

That sort of price action reignited a debate ahead of the last IPO boom in 2020 and 2021, when venture capitalist Bill Gurley made the case that big first-day pops suggest intentionally mispriced offerings that hurt the company and hand easy money to new investors. Gurley has advocated for direct listings, where companies list shares at a price that effectively matches demand.

As Figma was hitting the market, Gurley was back at it, referring to the big gains as an “expected & fully intentional” outcome benefitting clients of major investment banks

“They bought it at $33 last night and can sell it today for over $90,” he wrote. In a follow-up post, he said, “I would have loved to see DLs replace IPOs — it just makes sense to match supply/demand. But Wall Street may just be too addicted to the massive customer give-aways.”

Lise Buyer, founder of IPO advisory firm Class V Group, wrote on LinkedIn that the company gets to make the call on where it prices the stock and that plenty of thought gets put into the process. Also, in the IPO, companies are selling only a small percentage of outstanding shares — in Figma’s case roughly 7% — so if they deliver on results, “there will very likely be plenty of future opportunities to sell more shares at higher prices.”

That’s already happening.

Circle said this week that it’s offering another 10 million shares in a secondary offering. And on Friday’s, CNBC’s Leslie Picker reported that bankers for CoreWeave, which is up 150% since its March IPO, orchestrated some block trades this week.

But Buyer warns that tech markets have a history of overheating. While there’s always a difference between what institutions are willing to pay in an IPO and what exuberant retail investors will pay, it’s currently “a gap like we haven’t really seen since 1999, 2000,” Buyer told CNBC, adding “and, of course, we know how that ended.”

Compared to the dot-com bubble, businesses that are going public now have sizable revenue and actual fundamentals, but that doesn’t mean the IPO pops are sustainable, she said.

“It’s almost like we had several years of Prohibition,” Buyer said, referring to a period a century ago when alcohol was banned in the U.S. “Folks, in some cases, are drinking to excess in the IPO market.”

WATCH: Bankers lead block trades in CoreWeave

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Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle Internet Group, the issuer of one of the world’s biggest stablecoins, and Circle Internet Group co-founder Sean Neville react as they ring the opening bell, on the day of the company’s IPO, in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.

NYSE

For over three years, venture capital firms have been waiting for this moment.

Tech IPOs came to a virtual standstill in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, while big acquisitions were mostly off the table as increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe turned away potential buyers.

Though it’s too soon to say those days are entirely in the past, the first half of 2025 showed signs of momentum, with June in particular producing much-needed returns for Silicon Valley’s startup financiers. In all, there were five tech IPOs last month, accelerating from a monthly average of two since January, according to data from CB Insights.

Highlighting that group was crypto company Circle, which more than doubled in its New York Stock Exchange debut on June 5, and is now up sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of $42 billion. The stock got a big boost in mid-June after the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal framework for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins.

Venture firms General Catalyst, Breyer Capital and Accel now own a combined $8 billion worth of Circle stock even after selling a fraction of their holdings in the offering. Silicon Valley stalwarts Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital are set to soon profit from Figma’s IPO, after the design software vendor filed its public prospectus on Tuesday. Since its $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped in late 2023, Figma has been one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in startup land.

It’s “refreshing and something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said Eric Hippeau, managing partner at early-stage venture firm Lerer Hippeau, regarding the exit environment. “I’m not sure that we are confident that this can be a sustained trend yet, but it’s been very encouraging.”

Another positive sign for the industry the past couple months was the performance of artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in late March. The stock was relatively stagnant for its first month on the market but shot up 170% in May and another 47% in June.

For venture firms, long considered the lifeblood of risky tech startups, IPOs are essential in order to generate profits for the university endowments, foundations and pension funds that allocate a portion of their capital to the asset class. Without handsome returns, there’s little incentive for limited partners to put money into future funds.

After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, every year since has been relatively dismal. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.

The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.

‘Backlog of liquidity’

In its 2024 yearbook, the National Venture Capital Association said that even with a 34% increase in U.S. VC exit value last year to $98 billion, that number is 87% below the 2021 peak and less than half the average for the four years from 2017 through 2020. It’s a troubling dynamic for the 58,000 venture-backed companies that have raised a total of $947 billion from investors, according to the annual report, which is produced by the NVCA and PitchBook.

“This backlog of liquidity drought risks creating a ‘zombie company’ cohort — businesses generating operational cash flow but lacking credible exit prospects,” the report said.

Other than Circle, the latest crop of IPOs mostly consists of smaller and lesser-known brands. Health-tech companies Hinge Health and Omada Health are valued at about $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. Etoro, an online trading platform, has a market cap of just over $5 billion. Online banking provider Chime Financial has a higher profile due largely to a years-long marketing blitz and is valued at close to $11.5 billion.

Meanwhile, the highest valued private companies like SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks remain on the sidelines, and AI highfliers OpenAI and Anthropic continue to raise massive amounts of cash with no intention of going public anytime soon.

Still, venture capitalists told CNBC that there are plenty of companies with the financial metrics to be public, and that more of them are readying for the process.

“The IPO market is starting to open and the VC world is cautiously optimistic,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark in New York. “We are preparing companies for the next wave of public offerings.”

There are other ways to make money in the meantime. Secondary sales, a process that involves selling private shares to new investors, are on the rise, allowing early employees and investors to get some liquidity.

And then there’s what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, as he tries to position his company at the center of AI innovation and development.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Last month, Meta announced a $14 billion bet on Scale AI, taking a 49% stake in the AI startup in exchange for poaching founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his top engineers. The deal effectively bought out half of the stock owned by investors, leaving them with the opportunity to make money on the rest of their holdings, should a future acquisition or IPO take place.

The deal is a big win for Accel, which led Scale AI’s Series A round in 2017, and is poised to earn more than $2.5 billion in the transaction. Index Ventures led the Series B in 2018, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the Series C the following year at a valuation of over $1 billion.

Investors now hope the Federal Reserve will move toward a rate-cutting campaign, though the central bank hasn’t committed to one. There’s also ongoing optimism that regulators will make going public less burdensome. Last week, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that U.S. stock exchanges and the SEC have discussed loosening regulations to make IPOs more enticing.

Mike Bellin, who heads consulting firm PwC’s U.S. IPO practice, said he anticipates a diversity of IPOs across sectors in the second half of the year. According to data from PwC, pharma and fintech were among the most active sectors for deals through the end of May.

While the recent trend in IPO activity is an encouraging sign for investors, potential roadblocks remain.

Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty delayed IPO plans from companies including Klarna and StubHub in April. Neither has provided an update on when they plan to debut.

FirstMark’s Heitzmann said the path forward is “not at all clear,” adding that he wants to see a strong quarter of economic stability and growth before confidently saying that the market is wide open.

Additionally, other than CoreWeave and Circle, recent tech IPOs haven’t had big pops. Hinge Health, Chime and eToro have seen relatively modest gains from their offer price, while Omada Health is down.

But virtually any activity beats what VCs were experiencing the last few years. Overall, Hippeau said recent IPO trends are generally encouraging.

“There’s starting to be kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Hippeau said.

WATCH: Uptick in VC-backed startup deals

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