Most data for today’s episode was provided by our partner Multiples.vc, your go-to source for verified M&A valuation multiples and public comps based on analyst estimates, at a fraction of the price of legacy data providers.

With this monthly format, we aim 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:

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

SpaceX made the biggest move in the last few weeks, doubling its valuation to $800bn with 2026 IPO plans targeting as much as $1.5tn. This re-rating reflects strong demand for equity from institutional investors, back-solicited placements, and renewed confidence in the company’s long-term growth trajectory, particularly driven by Starlink’s accelerating broadband adoption and SpaceX’s expanding launch cadence and government contract backlog. The valuation also implies that investors are increasingly pricing in the Optionality of future revenue streams (e.g., Starlink v2, next-gen satellites, and reusable launch economics) rather than purely historical financials.

OpenAI and Tether remain roughly flat at ~$500B. Following the impressive Google Gemini release end of November, Sam Altman called “code red” early December and worked hard to retain their leading position. The results? GPT5.2 release with strong Codex and Image gen performance, $1bn investment by Disney, and IPO rumours for 2026. The race is on.

Databricks also edges into the spotlight, moving from roughly $100B to $134B, while the rest of the list stays largely unchanged. Overall, December feels less like a broad repricing and more like a selective bet on who might realistically hit public markets next.

Talking about the private market asset class, one bottleneck remains liquidity. So let’s look at the first of two channels: IPOs.

Public listing activity remains low.

After an active summer with companies like Figma or Klarna successfuly completing their IPOs, we didn’t see any tech IPO in the last two months. It’s a broader reflection of 2025: Tech IPO activity reopened, but only for quality. Listings were concentrated in AI, data infrastructure, fintech, and cybersecurity, with investors clearly prioritizing scale, revenue visibility, and improving margins. Many headline companies stayed private, using 2025 to reset valuations, clean up balance sheets, and test public-market appetite rather than rush out.

Looking ahead, 2026 starts with a huge backlog of high-quality private assets. The most likely candidates range from AI and data infrastructure leaders such as Databricks, OpenAI (structure permitting), and Anthropic; to fintech scale players like Stripe, Revolut, and Chime once market windows align; and platform companies with durable cash flows such as ByteDance, Canva, and Discord. On the industrial and frontier side, SpaceX (potentially via Starlink) stands out if IPO rumors solidify, while cybersecurity and enterprise software names like Snyk and Rippling round out the cohort of companies that could credibly anchor large, institutionally supported listings in 2026.

In light of very few public listings in the last few months, M&A has surged to become the more critical path for liquidity this year.

M&A activity remains high.

In the chart above, we only include M&A transactions with confirmed EVs available at Multiples.vc, thus structurally exclude the long tail noise of smaller EV transactions.