This monthly deep-dive format aims to unify market & valuation data into a single episode, so you don't need to check various sources for a complete picture. Here's what we'll cover today:

#1 Markets

#2 Multiples

We have a lot on the agenda, so let's jump in 👇

AI met politics, and inflation kept rising.

Start with public markets.

Democrats took both chambers of US Congress on 3 November. Two days later the Nasdaq fell 5.5%, its worst day in over 18 months, as investors priced in tougher rules for data centers. Then Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO. The S&P 500 still ended last week up 2.5%.

Inflation keeps climbing. US consumer prices rose 0.4% in October and markets expect another Fed hike around 9 December. Eurozone inflation hit 4.0%, its highest in three years.

Private markets kept raising.

OpenAI's round of up to $15B priced it at $1.25T, less money at a lower price than it first asked for. Anthropic prices its IPO on 18 November, with a range valuing it at up to $1.41T. October venture funding reached $59B, led by DeepSeek's $15.9B round.

In short, inflation is still rising and one of the first frontier AI labs is about to get a public price. The charts below break it down.

OpenAI retakes the top spot at $1.3T, up 53% from $852B last month. Anthropic holds at $965B, its May Series H price, days before its IPO sets a new one.

The top two AI labs are worth $2.27T, more than the other eight combined ($1.81T). Below them, Tether enters at third with $500B and no priced round, and Ant Group drops out. ByteDance, Databricks, Stripe, Blue Origin, Waymo, Revolut and Reliance Retail all hold their previous marks.

Here’s our 2026 IPO list based on rumors, plans, and status quo of their operations:

No new listings from our table this month, but the biggest one is a week away.

Anthropic launched its roadshow on 10 November, offering 825M shares at $70 to $78, worth up to $64.4B at the top of the range. That values it at $1.02T on outstanding shares and up to $1.41T fully diluted, with pricing expected on 18 November and Nasdaq trading as ANT from 19 November. Bankers are reportedly weighing a price above the range after the book was covered at launch.

At the top of the range, that would be the largest US listing since SpaceX raised $75B in June. Two of the three most valuable private companies of the past year will have listed within six months, which leaves OpenAI as the one frontier lab whose price is still set in private rounds.

Oura, which shelved its ~$2.2B IPO in September despite a covered book, is still on hold. Meanwhile, it agreed to buy AI-native primary care company Counsel Health for $625M in cash, as it reported quarterly revenue of $533M, up 153% year on year.

Deal value hit a record $3.5T in Multiples' data, up from $3.0T on last month's chart and already above the $3.1T full-year totals of both 2025 and 2021, with six weeks still to go.

That is roughly $0.5T added in a month. For scale, Marvell's $115B Lumentum deal alone equals almost a quarter of that.

The average deal is $203M, 19% above 2025's $171M and 65% above 2024's $123M. On this month's chart, only 2015 ($232M) saw bigger average checks.

The bars put 2026 at roughly 17,000 deals so far, close to 2025's full-year count of about 18,000, so the record comes mainly from bigger checks.

Lumentum to Marvell Technology at $115,000M dwarfs the table. The all-stock deal, announced on 2 November, is larger than the other nine combined ($107,973M) and cleared 38.2x revenue and 81.0x EBITDA, an AI-infrastructure premium at mega-cap size. Its EBITDA multiple is nearly eight times the Top 10 median of 10.5x.

Instacart to DoorDash follows at $17,000M (4.2x revenue), then the Penske Automotive take-private ($16,300M, 0.5x).

Below Lumentum, the other nine cleared 0.5x to 8.9x revenue, so pricing stayed moderate. Buyers include EQT, CPP Investments and ADIA for Qiagen, EQT for Cleanaway, Apax for Odido, Thrive Holdings for ADT, EQT Corporation (the US gas producer) for Range Resources and GE Vernova for Trench Group. Private equity wrote four of them: EQT twice, Apax, and Thrive Holdings, the OpenAI-backed spin-out of Thrive Capital.

Where the table shows an EBITDA multiple, the non-AI deals cleared 5.7x to 15.6x. Outside the one AI outlier, the biggest checks went to established businesses, including diagnostics, gas, grid equipment, waste, security and telecom.

The Top 10 median EV rose 61% to $12,470M, with EV/Revenue up to 4.1x from 3.4x and EV/EBITDA down to 10.5x from 14.0x. Across all deals in the last 30 days, the median slipped to $135M EV and 9.7x EBITDA from $154M and 11.2x, with revenue multiples flat at 2.0x.

BioXcel's rights unit to Teva leads at 89.6x on just $58M EV, followed by Egetis to ANI Pharmaceuticals at 68.1x. As in August and October, biopharma assets with little revenue top the table.

AI is back. A month after no AI deal made the list, four AI-related deals do: Lumentum (38.2x), Faraday Future's robotics unit (28.6x), Cresta to Salesforce ($2,700M, 27.0x) and Level AI to Five9 ($325M, 16.3x). The last two are pure-play AI software companies bought by established software vendors. Incumbents priced as mature software are paying AI multiples to stay relevant.

The Top 10 median rose to 21.6x from 10.7x, on a median EV of $581M. Octus to the London Stock Exchange Group cleared 11.8x and Varonis to Proofpoint 10.1x, so established software and data still clear between 10x and 12x.

Compared to October, the Top 10 average fell for a second month while the Top 50 average rose.

Let's start with a snapshot of top companies based on EV/NTM Revenue multiples. For all analysis below, we exclude companies with market caps below $1B and non-meaningful multiples above 100x.

Top 10 average 19.2x, median 14.5x, from 20.4x and 15.6x in October. The same ten names hold for a third month and median growth held at 22%, so the decline is pure multiple compression.

CrowdStrike takes the lead at 34.4x from 32.8x. Palantir, the fastest grower in the table, took the biggest cut of the top three, falling to 32.7x from 38.1x (-14%) even as growth edged up to 57% from 54% and EBITDA margin to 64%. Cloudflare dropped to 26.5x from 29.8x (-11%).

VeriSign trades at 15.6x on 10% growth and a 73% EBITDA margin, above Snowflake at 13.3x on 30% growth and a 19% margin.

The Top 10 median now trades at 6.6x the software median (14.5x against 2.2x), down from 7.1x in October, on twice the growth (22% against 11%) and 32% EBITDA margins against 19%. The quality premium is narrowing.

Below are the EV/NTM Revenue trendline, the Top 50 list, the multiples split by sector, and the efficiency benchmarks 👇