This year, the biggest companies will finally go public. But this is when the big question is asked: Who is going to profit?
There’s an oddity in modern finance. Companies that have historically been the most valuable are taking much longer than ever to go public. When they eventually decide to do so, most of the gains have already been realized, not by you.
The spotlight is on SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, among other IPO hopefuls. These are no longer unknown startups; everybody knows who they are. But what matters is that these are no longer startups. These are established behemoths. They are called “private” companies for technical reasons, but they create tremendous value without much participation from the public market.
And 2026 is when this tension finally boils over.
The IPO drought has lasted three years due to rising interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty, and the overarching philosophy of “let’s remain private as long as we can.” But now the floodgates have opened, and there is a backlog of deals ready to launch, most of which investors aren’t ready to see coming.
But the irony is that by the time a stock has been featured on all the podcasts, made headlines, and found its way onto all the retail investor IPO radar lists, much of the value has already been priced into the deal.
That’s when all the real money will be made with those companies that have yet to break through to the mainstream. They are underappreciated companies with solid fundamentals that are still undiscovered, whereas everyone else will just be chasing after the same ones.
In 2026, we can expect one of the most active IPO seasons in recent times, with estimates of 200 to 230 offerings totaling $40 to 60 billion. Amidst this crowd, a few of them will emerge with very different characteristics.
Let’s break them down 👇
Cerebras Systems: The Only Real Challenger to Nvidia
When everyone is busy discussing the pros and cons of this or that AI model, virtually nobody pays attention to who supports them. NVIDIA has enjoyed a de facto monopoly in AI computations for many years now. The first company with any chance of breaking it is Cerebras Systems.
The Wafer-Scale Engine 3 of theirs isn’t just better; it’s different literally. An incredibly powerful system that is 58 times larger than Nvidia’s B200, featuring 900,000 cores and 44 gigabytes of memory. No network overhead, no need to learn anything new. Just one chip and one model.
Need we say more? OpenAI inked a deal valued at more than $20 billion in January 2026, licensing Cerebras’ chips for inference operations, a move CEO Andrew Feldman described as “stealing the fast inference market from Nvidia.” In March, Amazon Web Services became the first hyperscaler to implement Cerebras’ chips in its data centers.
Cerebras submitted an application for its initial public offering on April 17, 2026, to the Nasdaq Stock Market, listing itself under the ticker symbol CBRS. The firm generated $510 million in revenue during 2025, marking a 76% increase over the previous year, with $87.9 million in profits, after losing $485 million the prior year.
For a valuation target of $22 — 25 billion, Cerebras’ price-to-sales ratio is approximately 45. Sounds steep until you know that Nvidia’s market cap is $5 trillion plus, with a price to sales ratio of 25, even though Cerebras has a growth rate of 76% and a backlog of $24.6 billion.
Undervalued because: The market perception is that of “an alternative to Nvidia.” It isn’t. It is now becoming infrastructure. If you have OpenAI, Amazon, and Meta as your customers, then you are no longer an alternative.
Kraken: The Crypto Exchange Nobody Prices Correctly
The company went public via an IPO filing in November 2025, only to suspend in March 2026 when the crypto market environment turned sour. Everybody left the company. And this is a terrible mistake.
This is what everybody else has overlooked: Kraken’s quarterly profit stood at $648 million, representing a rise of 50% from the previous quarter. The platform's transaction volume totaled $576.8 billion. Kraken had adjusted EBITDA of $178.6 million. In 2024, annual revenue was at $1.5 billion, while in 2025 it is estimated to exceed $2.5 billion.
Nevertheless, after this, the company saw its valuation plunge sharply. Following Deutsche Börse's $200 million investment in April 2026, Kraken's valuation fell by 33%, from $20 billion to $13.3 billion. The owner of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange purchased a 1.5% share of Kraken.
Then this happened: One of the biggest traditional exchanges on the continent acquired a crypto exchange at a significant valuation discount relative to its latest fundraising round. This isn’t bearish. This is an institution capitalizing on value.
Kraken is currently valued at roughly $13.3 billion, based on Deutsche Börse’s $200 million investment for a 1.5% fully diluted stake, down from a $20 billion peak in late 2025. Compared to Coinbase, which trades around an 8x forward revenue multiple at roughly a $45 billion market cap, Kraken screens at a mid‑single‑digit to high‑single‑digit forward revenue multiple on 2025 estimates, depending on which forecast you use.
This stock is underpriced because, despite the market valuing Kraken as though there were no end to crypto winter, the company recently secured a bank deal with the Fed, partnered with Deutsche Börse, and is growing quarter over quarter by 50%+. As crypto sentiment changes, as it always will, its valuation adjusts overnight at IPO.
Cohesity: The Cybersecurity Giant Hiding in Plain Sight
As investors get caught up in the current AI frenzy, Cohesity continues to advance its plans to become the world's largest data protection company.
In December 2024, the company increased its market share from 5% to 19% after acquiring Veritas' enterprise data protection segment. With CEO Sanjay Poonen stating that “we wanted to be the biggest fish in the market and do an IPO,” his mission has come true: they plan to go public by the fall of 2026, taking cues from Rubrik, which went public in April 2024 with a $17 billion valuation.
Now, for the kicker, the advantage of most companies over others. Cohesity’s AI angle is where they really shine. Cohesity’s Gaia utilizes retrieval-augmented generation technology to transform enterprise-backed-up data into an AI search assistant. This whole AI angle was based on insights gathered during discussions with none other than Jensen Huang and Satya Nadella; Nvidia has invested in the company while Microsoft is its strategic partner.
The merged company was then worth around $7 billion. Implied valuations increased to $8 billion in the secondary markets in early 2025 due to subsequent trades. If Cohesity’s financial results are “comparable or better” to Rubrik's, at its 12.75x sales ratio, the result would be an expected valuation of $15 billion to $20 billion in a little-known IPO in the crypto and tech world.
Why is this stock undervalued? This company combines the two hottest categories — cybersecurity and AI — and yet flies under the radar since it serves enterprises rather than individual consumers. With this IPO, the story will shift from a “data backup service” to an “Nvidia-backed AI-based data security platform.”
Revolut: The $75 Billion Fintech That’s Not Public Yet
Perhaps Revolut is the world’s most valuable privately held fintech company, yet it remains private.
A secondary share issuance in November 2024 valued the company at $75 billion. Its income shot up by 72% in 2024 to reach $4 billion with pre-tax earnings of $1.4 billion. It has more than 65 million customers in over 100 countries.
The company began as an app for foreign exchange services but soon developed into a fully-fledged digital bank offering crypto trading, stock investing, insurance, credit facilities, and business accounts. It currently operates under a United Kingdom banking license and has been steadily expanding into lending, which offers the best margins in finance.
A 2026 IPO was always considered imminent, though there’s still a lot of room for timing. The size, financial performance, and international presence of the company all point to one thing: a historic fintech IPO that could easily beat or match Nubank's $45 billion market capitalization when it went public in 2021.
Reasons for the discount: For a privately held company with a $75 billion valuation, Revolut looks pricey at about a 19x revenue multiple. Still, it’s nothing compared to the 30x revenue multiple Nubank achieved at the time of its IPO, or even the 15x revenue multiple PayPal achieved at its peak with 5% earnings growth. Revolut has annual revenue growth of 72%, is currently profitable, and is going public at a 25–30x revenue multiple, giving it a market capitalization of $100–120 billion.
Plaid: The Invisible Infrastructure of Fintech
Every time you connect a bank account to Venmo, Robinhood, or Coinbase, Plaid powers it. The company’s APIs power the financial data connections for thousands of fintech apps, banks, and investment platforms.
Visa tried to acquire Plaid in 2020 for $5.3 billion. The Department of Justice blocked it as anti-competitive, which tells you everything about how critical Plaid’s position is. The company was last valued at $13.4 billion in its Series D round, though that figure dates back to the frothy 2021 market.
Plaid raised $575 million in April 2025 at a valuation of $6.1 billion, a significant decline from 2021. Plaid CEO Zach Perret indicated that an IPO might be “the direction we want to go” when it hired its first-ever CFO in December 2023, a classic IPO signal.
What makes it undervalued: The $6.1 billion valuation is a corrected figure based on the market’s 2022–2023 pessimism. Not in 2026 reality. Fintech is back. IPOs are happening. And Plaid is the picks-and-shovels story in the fintech stack. When Plaid goes public in either 2026 or early 2027, the valuation jump from $6 billion to $15–20 billion is inevitable.
The Math Nobody Talks About
In 2020, SpaceX had a valuation of $46B and aims for an IPO value of $2T in 2026, meaning 43x returns fully realized in the private markets. When retail investors can invest at IPO prices, the asymmetric return potential is all but exhausted, as it goes solely to the founders, VCs, and other institutions. Public investors find themselves investing at peaks rather than in early stages.
This is not specific to SpaceX, but a general trend among tech startups and IPOs. However, things are beginning to change.
There is a growing trend of platforms offering pre-IPO stock to users via tokenization. Essentially, the process involves buying the shares in Special Purpose Vehicles and issuing tokens as economic representation of those shares. Investors can start purchasing with a minimum of $100, offering early-stage potential.
Companies like PIPO have started building infrastructure to issue equity-linked tokens through custodial ownership and compliance via smart contract technology. These tokens can be traded on secondary markets with proper price discovery and can become actual securities in cases of IPOs, acquisitions, or mergers.
This is already happening. Bitget has started offering IPO listing services, and SpaceX is one of their first clients. Binance has added SpaceX‑ and OpenAI‑linked pre‑IPO tokens to its Web3 Wallet marketplace, giving retail users on‑chain exposure ahead of their eventual IPOs.
Robinhood has already launched tokenized versions of hundreds of U.S. stocks and ETFs for European clients, while Coinbase is seeking SEC approval to roll out its own tokenized stock products.
2026 is not just another IPO year but a new paradigm shift from privatization to liquidity. While the attention may not be on IPOs, it will certainly be on the underlying infrastructure layers, which will make up this decade of innovation: AI compute, energy, cybersecurity, financial services infrastructure, and cryptocurrency trading.
This is a completely new strategy, and ringing the IPO bell is no longer the game.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Pre-IPO investments carry significant risks, including potential total loss. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.
Top Undervalued IPOs of 2026 That Will Rock the Market was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
