Andrew Feldman (center left), co-founder and CEO of Cerebra Systems, Inc., during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq Marketsite on Thursday, May 14, 2026, in New York, USA.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
cerebral systemThis week’s noisy IPO gave investors a taste of the future of artificial intelligence. But it also served as a reminder of how difficult it is for non-AI companies to get Wall Street’s attention.
The AI chip maker’s stock soared nearly 70% in its market debut on Thursday, raising the company’s market capitalization to about $95 billion. To date, only two tech companies have closed their first day of trading in the United States with a valuation of more than $100 billion. alibaba and facebook.
Cerebras also holds the honor of being the year’s largest IPO and the largest initial public offering of a U.S. technology company since. Uber It appeared on the market in 2019.
The excitement surrounding Cerebras seems to bode well for a tech IPO market that has been largely dormant for the past four-plus years, but the problem for nearly all the companies in the pipeline is that their names aren’t SpaceX, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
All three companies, each valued at nearly $1 trillion or more, are in some stage of IPO preparation, with SpaceX expected to file a public prospectus as early as next week and the other two aiming for debuts later this year. Their offering is smaller than anything they’ve had so far, which will help further by comparison that other multi-billion dollar pre-IPO companies are all small.
“In theory, it’s very hard to care about anything other than a $3 trillion IPO next year,” Sam Lessin, a partner at Slow Ventures, told CNBC’s “The Exchange” on Thursday.
The market has been a challenge for emerging tech companies since early 2022, when soaring inflation and rising interest rates drove investors away from risk. Although there has been occasional flurry of activity since then, U.S. venture-backed exits last year were less than a third of their 2021 peak, and this year’s tech IPOs were almost non-existent, according to the National Venture Capital Association’s annual yearbook.
Cerebras offered investors one of the first opportunities to tap into the AI boom with a pure tech stock, as all activity to date has been in private markets. The largest service in this space so far has been an AI infrastructure provider coreweavewhich went public last March and is currently valued at more than $58 billion.
Lise Bayer, founder of IPO advisory firm Class V Group, said late-stage startups are in a period of “realistic preparation” and looking for potential signs of acceptance. But more data points are needed before the market is declared open, she said.
“The Haves and the Have-Nots”
The challenge for many acclaimed startups is not just that AI models are sucking up all the oxygen. Companies are also considering the reality that AI is the only thing generating excitement, and the majority of companies in the pre-IPO category were founded well before the launch of ChatGPT and the beginning of the generative AI boom.
“This is a story of the haves and the have-nots,” said Jay Das, a partner at Sapphire Ventures. “If you have a really strong AI story, you can get in there, but if you’re a SaaS company where there isn’t a lot of buzz around AI, it’s going to be hard to get general market interest right now.”
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies have been hit hardest by public markets due to concerns that many of their products will be replaced to some extent by AI models and agents.
Das said many so-called AI-native companies are likely to postpone going public as they scale up, or wait to see how demand follows OpenAI and Anthropic.
Rick Heitzman, a partner at venture firm Firstmark, said companies preparing for an IPO want to show that the market is receptive so others can jump in first.
“It will encourage people to say, ‘Hey, jump in, the water is warm,'” he says.
Cerebras is a good start, but it’s a special case. The company entered the market during the silicon renaissance, intel, advanced micro device and micron Everything is getting more expensive, and demand for chips associated with every part of the AI stack is skyrocketing. Cerebras claims its Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips run faster than graphics processing units from Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.
Earlier this year, Cerebras signed a $20 billion deal with OpenAI and also signed a deal with Amazon Web Services.
All eyes are now on SpaceX and Elon Musk’s efforts to bring reusable rocket manufacturers to the general market. In February, Musk merged SpaceX and his AI startup xAI in a deal worth $1.25 trillion. That market cap would instantly put SpaceX among America’s 10 most valuable tech companies.
“No one wants to be caught in the SpaceX blast radius,” said Lenos Savides, head of equity capital markets at Neuberger Berman. “If you have a small IPO and go public at the same time as SpaceX, no one is going to pay attention to your deal.”
Featured: DA Davidson’s Gil Luria talks about Cerebras’ market capitalization rise
