And indeed, that confidence led to the busiest start of a year for IPOs since the boom of 2020 and 2021. To be sure, after an initial burst of exuberance, March and April were rocky: A gale of macroeconomic forces—including tariffs and persistently high inflation and interest rates—led the pipeline to dry up as some firms put IPO plans on ice.

In the late spring, though, equities rebounded, and the pulse of the IPO market picked up again. Volume reached a total of 103 IPOs in the first half of 2025 on U.S. exchanges, compared with 78 for the same period in 2024, according to Dealogic analysis. The largest IPO so far has been for Venture Global, a liquefied natural gas exporter, which successfully raised $1.75 billion in January; in all, the year’s first-half IPOs raised $17 billion. (We offer outlooks on these pages for four of the most widely watched members of this year’s IPO class.)

Analysts and investors are optimistic that IPOs will remain strong into the fourth quarter, following a typical period of quiet through Labor Day.

“There’s a lot of continued strong interest around IPOs from companies that we’re speaking with,” says Rachel Gerring, EY Americas IPO leader. That’s “fueling optimism even beyond ’25 into ’26.”

Many analysts now view the current market conditions as a return to form, and expect 2025 to be the best year for IPOs since 2021, another step in the slow and steady climb back to pre-COVID levels of activity. And that could provide plenty of opportunities for discerning investors.

Encouraging signs

Several recent high-profile success stories illustrate why some analysts remain bullish. A flashy debut from Circle Internet Group saw the stablecoin issuer trading up post-issuance, and the company has experienced an extraordinary surge since its June 5 IPO. Its share price opened at $69 before peaking at over $263 later in the month; in mid-July it hovered around $230, more than triple its IPO price.

Circle’s success likely caught the attention of other pre-IPO cryptocurrency companies like Gemini, an exchange that confidentially filed for its debut in June. CoreWeave, an AI infrastructure company, had a lackluster debut amid the broader tech selloff in March, but its share price in mid-July was up 231% since its offering, having climbed from $40 to $132.

Others that listed in the first quarter have, of course, demonstrated less stellar post-offering performance. Still, analysts like what they see.

Gerring notes that activity is nowhere near 2021 levels. That was a record-breaking year that preceded a sharp contraction—total U.S. IPOs fell from 908 that year to just 149 in 2022, according to S&P Global. There was historically low activity from 2022 to 2024—and that’s a good thing, in Gerring’s book. Instead of a repeat of a cycle of over-exuberance followed by a prolonged hangover, she sees the IPO market recalibrating to pre-2020 levels, though she adds it will take time to get there.

“We’re not discouraged at all by the numbers and volumes that we’re seeing,” Gerring says, especially given that “there’s something occurring almost every quarter that companies have to navigate, that kind of shocks the system.”

One major difference between 2021 and now, says Mike Bellin, deals partner at PwC and leader of its U.S. IPO practice, is that companies coming to market this year are larger, have stronger growth fundamentals, and are more often profitable or on a path to profitability. That in turn can help performance not only at the IPO but after, which is what investors are looking for.

“There’s momentum in the market,” says Bellin, which in turn “opens the door further for some of the smaller, midcap-type companies that are in process and in the pipeline.”

Another encouraging feature of the current environment is that companies across sectors are preparing for their IPOs. Technology and health care companies are leading the way this year, but firms from the realms of fintech, energy, and defense are also moving to go public.

In any batch of IPOs, there will always be a select few that will be viewed fairly or not—by analysts and investors as best in breed. This year, the companies generating the most excitement about their potential debut on the public market include fintech company Klarna, digital design company Figma, payment processing company Stripe, and ticket exchange StubHub. The success of their offerings—and whether they happen at all—will depend of course, on macro-conditions.

“There’s a deep pipeline of quality companies that are looking at the capital markets,” Bellin says. “But there are a lot of known unknowns still in the market. I’ll say the door’s open for the IPO market in the second half of ’25, but it’s not wide open.”

What investors need to know

For the average retail investor, IPOs don’t necessarily represent buying opportunities; because of lockup periods and other restrictions, it can be nearly impossible for outsiders to invest before companies’ debuts, making any first-day pop in price moot for all but insiders and venture capitalists. Initial trading days can be extremely volatile, which won’t appeal to long-term investors. And of course, a newly public stock can always tank.

Concerns about the broader economy also affect the IPO market. Uncertainty is the overarching condition of 2025, the result in part of President Trump’s evolving and often unpredictable policy preferences, the acceleration of AI, and geopolitical conflict in many parts of the world. Macroeconomic conditions are on every analyst’s mind.

That uncertainty, particularly related to tariffs, has prompted some companies that at one time planned to list in early 2025 to delay their entrances, at least until later in the year and possibly until early 2026, to see how the president’s policies affect consumer spending, inflation, and interest rates. On the other hand, if Trump rethinks his tariff strategy and the Federal Reserve is able to cut benchmark rates this year, more IPOs will likely be on the horizon.

“The trade policy, if that starts to take a turn for the worse, that will ultimately shut down the IPO market,” says Bellin. On the other hand, he says, “If we do continue to get good readouts from a macro perspective and limited geopolitical disruption, the capital markets will be an exciting place to be and to watch.

This article appears in the August/September 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “Is it safe to get back in the IPO waters?“

Fintech

Chime

Chime Financial is a fintech that provides banking services to lower-income U.S. consumers, in part through its mobile app, though it isn’t a bank itself. It went public in June at an $11.6 billion valuation. While that’s less than half of the $25 billion private market Chime boasted in 2021, analysts generally believe the company is in better shape than it was back then: Chime is now profitable, with 8.6 million active users. It has been criticized for its failure to diversify its finances. Much of Chime’s revenue comes from interchange, the fee merchants pay when consumers use a Chime-issued debit or credit card. And it has lots of competition from rivals that are banks or fintechs offering similar services. —Luisa Beltran

Bull case: Chime continues to grow its sticky user base to drive increased product adoption and expand.

Bear case: Chime fails to expand its revenues beyond interchange, and its share price drops below its $27 IPO level.

Crypto

Circle

Crypto may be known for extreme price swings, as investors leap in and out of assets like Bitcoin and Shiba Inu. But there’s an increasingly popular option for those who want exposure to the sector without buying actual cryptocurrencies: Circle, a stablecoin company that issues a dollar-backed cryptocurrency, USD Coin (USDC). Ahead of its June IPO, analysts warned that Circle’s core business—earning revenue off the interest from the assets backing USDC—did not offer much upside. But since then, the stock has behaved more like a cryptocurrency, with wild fluctuations including the biggest two-day pop of any major stock since 1980. —Leo Schwartz

Bull case: Circle benefits from a broader crypto boom and thawing regulatory outlook, as more companies push into stablecoin adoption.

Bear case: Circle’s share price continues to drop back to earth, and the company continues to struggle with the same revenue-stream questions.

AI

Coreweave (CRWV)

CoreWeave’s tepid IPO meant little to investors who wanted apiece of one of the market’s hottest trades: AI infrastructure (cloud-based, in CoreWeave’s case). CoreWeave generated nearly $1 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter, and Nvidia and OpenAI are investors. In July, it agreed to buy data center provider Core Scientific for $9 billion in stock. In return, it would get about 1.3 gigawatts of power capacity and eliminate more than $10 billion in longterm lease obligations. CoreWeave is still highly leveraged, however. Analysts estimated it has between $12 billion and $17 billion in debt. Losses have increased, and CoreWeave is heavily reliant on Microsoft for revenue. —L.B.

Bull case: Buying Core Scientific helps de-risk CoreWeave, and its financials improve.

Bear case: AI adoption slows, and CoreWeave topples under its heavy debt load.

Stock trading

eToro

When eToro went public in May, investors saw the trading platform’s performance as a harbinger of whether the fintech IPO window would open back up. Its share price popped—and the window opened—but that doesn’t necessarily make eToro a good investment. As a competitor to Robinhood, eToro offers an app-driven next generation alternative to stodgier brokerages like Schwab, providing experimental products like copy trading, where customers can mimic the investing behavior of other users, as well as an array of crypto assets.

Bull case: eToro can ride the wave of interest in retail trading of riskier—and higher-upside—assets like crypto.

Bear case: The platform fails to gain traction against larger rivals like Robinhood or well-heeled incumbents.