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Employees at the most valuable private companies approaching IPOs are increasingly declining to sell into tender offers worth billions of dollars, even as investor demand to buy their shares far outstrips what's available.
The holdouts are reshaping how pre-IPO liquidity works at the three most valuable private companies: Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX. Tender offers from US startups hit $18.4 billion in 2025, according to PitchBook research. For employees at these companies headed for mega-IPOs, the math has changed.
I'm Michael Bodley, and this is The Weekend Pitch. You can reach me at michael.bodley@pitchbook.com or on LinkedIn.
"There is less incentive to sell into a tender the closer a company gets to an IPO, as the employees can sense a liquidity event on the horizon," said Shriram Bhashyam, COO of Sydecar, an SPV execution platform.
Anthropic's most recent tender offer fell short of the roughly $6 billion of equity investors had hoped to purchase, as employees held on to shares at a $350 billion valuation, according to an investor in the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The company's annualized revenue has surpassed $30 billion—up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, Bloomberg reported.
OpenAI expanded its tender last fall, from a $6 billion target to $10.3 billion to accommodate investor demand, according to reports. But employees ultimately sold roughly $6.6 billion in stock, leaving $4 billion in unfulfilled buyer interest. That $6.6 billion tender alone accounted for 6.2% of all 2025 US secondary transaction value, according to PitchBook data.
It's unclear whether SpaceX had a similar gap in employees willing to sell their shares in its December 2025 tender offer valuing it at $800 billion, though the company was already said to be targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation for a 2026 IPO. |
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VC dealmaking and exits both rose to new heights in Q1 2026, but the uneven distribution of deal and exit value in the US tells a different story. Exit value hit $347.3 billion in Q1, but by what percentage does this number fall if the top five largest exits are excluded?
A) 56.6%
B) 66.6%
C) 76.6%
D) 86.6%
Find your answer at the bottom of The Weekend Pitch! |
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A selection from our most-read articles of the past few days.
- Wealth management firms are selling faster than ever as PE and asset managers race to capture the booming ultra-high-net-worth market. Go deeper
- The SaaS-pocalypse has created an opportune time for bargain hunting, Thoma Bravo founder Orlando Bravo said, amid a sell-off that has wiped trillions of dollars off the value of technology stocks. Catch up on his comments
- A deal drought is driving PE executives toward credit and secondaries—but returning to buyouts may become less straightforward over time. Read more
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“We see the UK government’s AI fund as a drop in the ocean when it comes to investment needed within the domestic ecosystem. Whilst the government’s backing is better than none and is likely to help earlier-stage companies where check sizes are smaller, we believe significantly deeper levels of capital are needed from an institutional level to ensure that UK startups can compete not just on a European level, but on a global playing field.”
—Navina Rajan, PitchBook senior analyst, discussing the UK's new sovereign AI fund targeting investments in domestic startups. Read more about the UK's quest for homegrown AI technology. |
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Answer: D
Excluding the top five exits of Q1, exit value fell by 86.6% for the quarter, demonstrating extreme concentration in the VC market to start off the year. Read the Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
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This edition of The Weekend Pitch was written by Michael Bodley and Nadine Manske. It was edited by Kia Kokalitcheva and Nadine Manske.
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