Dealogic: the IPO market in 2022 is the lowest since 2009; companies have raised $5.1B in IPOs this year so far, compared to $100B+ at the same time last year
Corrie Driebusch / Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @ychernova , @jsadinolfi , @saraheneedleman , and @lisaabramowicz1 Tweets: Yuliya Chernova / @ychernova : “I don't think a lot of companies that are private right now expected they'd be private by now,” said Barrett Daniels, U.S. IPO co-leader at Deloitte. The IPO market this year is on pace to be even worse than in 2008.https://www.wsj.com/... via @cdriebusch @jsadinolfi : “It might feel better because the market bounced in July, but there's still so much uncertainty. There's just no demand for companies coming to market.” https://www.wsj.com/... Sarah E. Needleman / @saraheneedleman : The IPO market this year is on pace to be even worse than during the 2008 financial crisis. “Going backwards is hard to compute.” @cdriebusch https://www.wsj.com/... Lisa Abramowicz / @lisaabramowicz1 : Traditional IPOs have raised only $5.1 billion so far this year, versus the $33 billion that's typical at this point in the year. Last year at this point, these offerings had raised more than $100 billion. https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2022 freeze ends a five-year run Dealogic had been tracking since US-listed IPOs topped $18B in 2017 and first-half 2018 tech volume nearly doubled year over year, culminating in 38 billion-dollar-plus tech listings in 2018 alone. Even in those boom years, issuers were already rationing supply — selling just 17% of themselves on average and rushing follow-on offerings within 180 days — so the pipeline was thinner than headline volume suggested.
What changed in 2022 is demand, not just supply: $5.1B raised versus $100B+ at the same point in 2021, with Deloitte's Barrett Daniels noting private companies never planned to still be private by now. Ernst & Young's full-year tally would later put the damage at a 94% collapse in US tech IPO proceeds, from $155.8B to $8.6B, confirming August's stall was the whole year, not a soft patch.
First-order effects
- Companies that expected to be public by mid-2022 stay private instead, delaying cash-outs for founders, employees, and late-stage investors who priced their rounds against a 2021 exit window.
- Bank equity-underwriting desks lose the fee pool almost entirely — $5.1B of proceeds leaves little to syndicate, hitting the same dealmakers who booked the $100B+ 2021 pipeline.
Second-order effects
- The follow-on mechanics Dealogic documented in 2018 — small IPO floats topped up with secondaries within 180 days — invert into pure private-market financing, pushing valuation discovery onto late-stage rounds where markdowns replace public price discovery.
- Underwriters compete for a drastically smaller deal count, pressuring fees and pushing banks to pitch down-market deals and restructurings while waiting out the window.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry normalizes around the pre-boom baseline Dealogic recorded in 2017–2018 rather than the 2020–21 peak, with IPOs treated as an opportunistic window rather than a scheduled milestone — extending the stay-private-longer structure that already had Uber and Airbnb waiting on the sidelines years ago.
- A multi-year listing drought concentrates exit pressure on the 2021 vintage of late-stage private companies, setting up a backlog that will test whether the public market can absorb deferred supply when sentiment turns.
The trend: The IPO window has closed from record 2021 issuance to post-2009 lows, pushing venture-backed companies back into extended private ownership and making listing timing a function of market conditions rather than company maturity.