Jersey Mike's and Reformation both went public on July 30, 2026. They were among a small number of consumer businesses to list in 2026, based on Renaissance data, and they represented only a sliver of the year's IPOs.
It wasn't always this quiet. In 2021, Nasdaq welcomed 743 IPOs, and the NYSE reported that companies listing that year brought in more than $1 trillion of new market capitalization, a second consecutive record for new listings. Morningstar calculated that 2021's IPO class raised close to $500 billion, roughly twice the deal volume and capital raised in 2020. Five years ago, the biggest offerings came from Coinbase, Roblox, Rivian, Warby Parker and others across many industries.
Activity has fallen off sharply since then. Even after Elon Musk's SpaceX completed a blockbuster public listing, the number of businesses deciding to list has stayed far lower, and some newly public companies have struggled to build momentum.
The ability to buy and sell shares in private companies has made staying private more appealing, experts say. Sunaina Sinha Haldea of Raymond James, who oversees private capital advisory, said secondary markets have become a "pressure release valve."
"Nobody has to go public now because of the depth of this private secondaries market," she said.
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Mike Dinsdale, CEO of publicly listed investment fund Powerlaw, said an abundance of private capital, deep secondary markets and megafunds have eliminated the need to rush an IPO.
"The reason for that, I think, is access to capital, and then the idea that staying private and not having any transparency into what's happening, and then higher valuations on the public side."
Jason Yeh, co-founder of consumer-focused venture capital firm Patron, said stock-market volatility and disappointing returns for publicly traded consumer and retail companies have reinforced the reluctance to leave the private sphere.
"There are very large asset managers, hedge funds and other types of investors that want to buy these later-stage stakes in these large companies, and they're able to push out having to go public longer, and you can get liquidity for earlier stage investors through that," Yeh said.
"In general, founders don't want to go public, the majority don't, because all of a sudden they have more visibility into what they're doing," Dinsdale said. "The public now has access to numbers and it has opinions on what they're doing versus being more in control."
Sinha Haldea put the tradeoff bluntly:
"If you are a CEO of a fast-growing company and there's plenty of capital available, and you don't have to deal with the governance and the reporting structures and the quarterly clock of being a public company, why would you put yourself through that?"
"I do think for companies with a really strong business model of generating a lot of cash flow, eventually they will go public," Yeh said. "Hopefully, the overall macroeconomic conditions are better when that happens, versus doing it into a weaker market."
Avoiding quarterly earnings pressure is one of the biggest incentives to stay private. President Donald Trump has floated ending mandatory quarterly earnings reports, and the SEC backed the move earlier this year. If adopted, companies would report only twice a year instead. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said in May that current rules have too much "rigidity" for companies and investors.
Dinsdale said there needs to be both "the carrot and the stick" to revive the IPO market: companies should no longer find it so easy to remain private, and regulators should create incentives for listing. Sinha Haldea described public-company regulation as a "headwind" to going public.
"It feels like we're on the cusp of a handful of companies that, theoretically, on paper, should have been able to go public over the last couple of years, but will be going public ideally in the next 12 to 18 months," Yeh said.
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