Signage at a Jersey Mike’s restaurant in Washington, July 20, 2026.
Graeme Sloan | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Five years after the initial public offering boom of 2021, public markets look a lot different as more companies are choosing to stay private for longer.
In 2021, public markets saw a multitude of companies join the ranks. The Nasdaq said it welcomed 743 IPOs that year, while the New York Stock Exchange said it added more than $1 trillion in new market capitalization, marking the second straight year of record new listings.
The biggest IPOs five years ago spanned a range of industries, including Coinbase, Roblox, Rivian, Warby Parker and more.
According to research from Morningstar, the companies that went public in 2021 raised almost $500 billion — roughly double the number of deals and capital raised in 2020, a year of intense uncertainty amid the pandemic and lowered consumer and investor confidence.
But since then, the IPO…
