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 👇

Rates up. Multiples up.

Start with public markets.

The Fed announced a rate increase from 3.75% to 4% on 16 September, its first hike in three years, and signalled another. US inflation is still running at 3.4%, with gasoline alone driving over a third of the monthly increase. The ECB and Bank of Japan moved in the same week. Japan increased rates to 1.25% from 1%, a 31-year high.

Bonds did the repricing. The 10-year Treasury passed 5%, its highest since July 2007.

Equities held, with the S&P 500 up roughly 12% this year.

Private markets are on a different clock.

Capital keeps concentrating. August brought $42 billion private money into 1,500 startups according to Crunchbase, seven of them raising a billion or more. Exits stay narrow. US venture-backed tech has raised close to $90 billion in public money this year, 83% of it SpaceX.

Then the AI trade was questioned from inside. Dario Amodei called for slower frontier development and Sam Altman agreed. In the same month, NVIDIA paid 86x revenue for Hugging Face. Semiconductors fell almost 6% in a session and Altman ruled out an OpenAI listing this year.

In short, rates went up, private funding stayed at record levels, and the sector absorbing most of that capital asked to slow down. The charts below break it down.

Anthropic holds first at $965B and OpenAI second at $852B, both unchanged for a third month. ByteDance sits third at $480B.

Databricks, Stripe, Waymo, and Revolut each shift position without their own valuations moving. Reliance Retail returns at eighth with $101B after dropping out last month. Anduril enters at tenth with $61B.

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

No new listings from our table this cycle but three status changes.

Anthropic pushed its IPO to November, a second delay after October slipped. It filed confidentially on 1 June and is reportedly weighing a new model release ahead of the listing.

OpenAI is out for the year. Sam Altman ruled out a 2026 listing on safety grounds in mid-September.

Oura filed publicly on 3 September under the ticker OURA, though it is not yet on the IPO calendar for this month.

YTD deal value reached $2.8T through September, from $2.6T in August. 2026 now sits within striking distance of 2025's full-year $3.2T with a quarter left.

Average deal size fell to $231M from $252M in August and $265M in July. It is now $2M above 2015 and $44M to $103M above each of the past five years.

USI Insurance Services to Aon at $17,000M leads, 5.7x revenue and 14.5x EBITDA.

The widely covered Hugging Face to NVIDIA deal follows at $12,900M, then Consolidated Precision Products to GE Aerospace at $11,750M.

Insurance brokerage is the theme nobody was watching. Three of the ten largest deals sit in the sector: USI to Aon at $17,000M, Baldwin to Sequence Holdings at $7,700M, and Steadfast Group to KKR and Dragoneer at $5,500M, spanning both strategic and private equity buyers. All three cleared 3.6x to 5.7x revenue and 11.0x to 22.3x EBITDA.

Top 10 median lands at $7,900M EV, 5.7x EV/Revenue, 19.9x EV/EBITDA. Overall last-30-days median is $150M EV, 2.3x EV/Revenue, 11.0x EBITDA, down from $208M EV and 2.5x EV/Revenue in August.

Hugging Face to NVIDIA at 86x is the outlier and the largest strategic AI acquisition in the dataset this year. It is also the first time a top-multiple deal has also been a top-size deal, which is what a genuine platform purchase looks like as opposed to an acquihire.

The Top 10 by EV/Revenue median rose to 20.0x from 17.5x in August and 6.7x in July. EV/EBITDA went the other way, easing to 19.9x from 21.8x. August's clean sweep of double-digit revenue multiples broke, with Atome to Grab at 9.6x and McGill and Partners to EQT at 8.0x.

Buyers paid more of the top price and less of the extreme one, and they paid it on revenue rather than earnings.

Compared to August, the top of the market pulled away. Everything else stood still.

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 21.0x, median 15.5x, up from 17.4x and 14.5x in August. Overall median at 2.2x, from 2.1x.

Palantir retakes first at 37.5x from 29.2x, reversing last month's fall on 56% NTM revenue growth with a 63% EBITDA margin. No other name in the table pairs growth and margin at that level.

CrowdStrike climbs to 34.8x from 28.0x. Cloudflare rose to 33.2x from 30.6x and still lost the top spot, which is the useful detail. This is not a Palantir story. The whole top cluster rerated and Cloudflare simply rerated less.

Four names entered: Palo Alto Networks at 20.5x, VeriSign at 15.3x on the best margins in the table, JFrog at 14.5x and Cadence at 11.4x.

AppLovin, Shopify, SoundHound and Guidewire dropped out. Among the survivors, Snowflake edged up to 15.7x from 15.0x, TechnologyOne fell to 11.8x from 12.8x, and Datadog fell to 15.2x from 18.8x one month after entering.

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