Dealogic: US tech IPOs, excluding Spotify's listing, raised ~$12.2B in 28 deals in the first half of 2018, nearly double the volume from the same period in 2017
Maureen Farrell / Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @jason , @cararlombardo , @reformedbroker , and @michaelbatnick Tweets: @jason : This is exceptional for job growth, retirement savings & trickle down economics. http://twitter.com/... Cara Lombardo / @cararlombardo : 120 companies have gone public in the U.S. this year, the highest volume since 2012 http://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ @maureenmfarrell Downtown Josh Brown / @reformedbroker : The IPO is back! In the first half of 2018: 120 companies came public $35.2 billion raised, the most since 2014 The average IPO trading 22% above offering price Average tech IPO 53% above Sonos, SurveyMonkey, Upwork and Eventbrite on deck http://www.wsj.com/... Michael Batnick / @michaelbatnick : If they do ring a bell at the top, and they don't, but if they do.. ""This year we're finding the investor demand for technology IPOs is literally the highest we've ever seen both in terms of the quantity and quality of interest" http://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The H1 2018 surge is the payoff to a reopening that began a year earlier, when US-listed IPOs topped $18B for all of 2017 even as marquee privates like Uber and Airbnb stayed on the sidelines. This report is the mid-year checkpoint showing that window widening fast: 28 tech deals raising ~$12.2B, double the prior-year pace, inside a broader market of 120 US listings raising $35.2B — the most since 2014.
The rest of the corpus confirms it was a full-cycle event, not a blip: by December, 38 tech and internet companies valued at $1B+ had gone public in 2018, the most since 2000. Issuers in this cohort included names like Eventbrite, Sonos, and SurveyMonkey, converting years of accumulated private valuations into tradable stock.
First-order effects
- Underwriters and late-stage private shareholders get their exit: with the average IPO trading 22% above its offering price, banks earn revived fees while pre-IPO investors and employees finally convert paper stakes into cash.
Second-order effects
- The reopened window pressures other high-profile holdouts — the same Uber-and-Airbnb cohort that sat out 2017 — to file before sentiment turns, feeding the deal count further.
- Issuers exploit the hot tape by selling as little stock as possible: tech startups sold just 17% of themselves on average in 2018 IPOs, and ~44% tapped secondary offerings within 180 days, keeping float tight and supporting post-IPO prices.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that follows in this data series is whipsaw, not steady state: 2021's record 127 IPOs raising $74.4B collapsed into 2022's slowest market since 2009, and the 2025 recovery — 51 US tech IPOs raising $16.8B, led by AI and crypto — still sits far below the peak, meaning windows open and shut faster than companies can plan around them.
- Because founders sell minimal primary stock into each window, the recurring structural effect is that public-market buyers absorb thin floats of already-mature private companies, shifting IPO economics from capital-raising events toward liquidity events for existing holders.
The trend: Tech IPO activity moves in sharp, short-lived windows — 2018's reopening, 2021's record, 2022's shutdown, 2025's AI-led partial recovery — with Dealogic's half-year counts marking each turn of the cycle.