CAPITAL MARKETS

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There’s a certain…Oura out there.

When biometric ring maker Oura postponed its planned IPO at the end of September, citing “uncertainty” in the market, to some, it was evidence of a larger trend in the 2026 IPO market: postponement is the name of the game.

The year thus far has ushered in a solid slate of IPOs, amounting to 118 deals with approximately $148.3 billion in proceeds in the US as of October 27, according to data from IPO specialist Renaissance Capital. (Those numbers are for IPOs at or above a $50 million market cap.)

Postponements are becoming noticeably prevalent as well: 13 companies have postponed their IPOs so far this year, including one sizable withdrawal in October, according to Renaissance Capital.

Matthew Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, told CFO Brew via email that the number of postponed or axed IPOs “doesn’t capture the far greater number of pre-IPO companies that had planned to go public, but never filed or launched due to market conditions.”

Even if a company’s IPO timing is thrown off, the best CFOs will keep putting in the work.—NP

      

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DUE DILIGENCE

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The private markets have swung like a pendulum the last few years, or back and forth like “Jekyll and Hyde,” as Vincent Calcagno, head of US growth at Ocorian, a global asset servicer, described it.

“2021 and 2022 [were] definitely sellers’ markets, and it progressively trailed off to the point where ’24 and ’25 first half, [there] were pretty low activity levels across the board,” Calcagno said. “In the fourth quarter of ’25, everyone got excited because things started accelerating. Activity-wise, it continued in Q1 ’26, but then it just fell off the map.”

That brief fourth quarter acceleration in private investment deals included EvoluteIQ landing an equity investment. Baird Capital invested $53 million in the AI automation platform “in a minority growth capital round” in September 2025, EvoluteIQ CFO Pallav Sharma said.

Preparing “reliable reporting, a forecast that the board generally trusts, and a business that’s ready for scrutiny at any time,” Sharma said, helped the company make the deal—oh, and confidence, of course.

Private equity investors are demanding lots of data and analytics.—DL

      

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Anthropic

TL;DR: Among the eye-popping numbers in Anthropic’s now-public IPO filing are some genuinely weird details, including a literal handful of very important customers, a strange corporate structure, and a secret line of succession that the Roy kids would kill for.

What happened: Anthropic is gearing up for what could be the biggest IPO ever in a few weeks, and most of what’s in the filing was expected (we’ve covered it here). But the hefty document, which mentions “revenue” about 460 times and “profit” just three (make of that what you will), has a few surprises:

• Only two companies made it onto Anthropic’s list of main rivals—OpenAI and Google (sorry, Meta, SpaceX, and Microsoft).
• A big chunk of its revenue this year (about 25%) came from just five customers through September, and many of them could cut back their spending at any point.
• An estimated 5% to 7% of its revenue during that time was from customers who violated its terms, including by using distillation (training an AI model on a rival model’s output). Anthropic is cutting them off, which could slow growth, it warned.

If one of Anthropic’s seven co-founders steps away or is removed, there is “a secret line of succession,” Tech Brew reports.—LC

      

market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: $15.6 million. That’s how much LIV Golf paid seven executives in retention bonuses ahead of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. (AP)

Quote: “The kind of manufacturing that is returning back to the US is not the same as what we used to have in the ’70s or ’80s or ’90s. You need this new worker that is very technology-centric.”—Binil Starly, director of Arizona State University’s School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks (Wall Street Journal)

Read: Here’s something else that’ll scare you this Halloween week: Hearing a “crunching sound” when unfolding your $1,999 iPhone Duo. 😱(Bloomberg)

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