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👇

The biggest change is OpenAI overtaking SpaceX to become the most valuable private company, jumping from ~$500B to ~$830B in their recent fundraise. SpaceX stays flat at ~$800B with plans to go public in 2026.

Anthropic nearly doubles its estimated valuation from ~$183B to ~$350B, and xAI jumps from ~$200B to ~$230B, with eye-watering percentage changes driven by relatively recent entry points. This signals continued capital concentration into frontier model builders, with investors clearly underwriting winner-take-most outcomes despite unresolved monetization questions.

ByteDance, Stripe, Databricks, Ant Group, Tether, and Reliance Retail show minimal movement in absolute valuation and rankings. Headcount growth is modest and incremental, suggesting the non-AI megacaps are in an execution and efficiency phase, while the market’s excitement—and repricing power—remains almost entirely concentrated in AI.

Talking about the private market asset class, one bottleneck remains liquidity.

Last year, only 20% of our top 50 list eventually completed an IPO. The rest wasn’t ready and keeps waiting in line.

So who’s most likely to go public in 2026?

Based on rumours, plans, or status quo of their operations, here’s our new list:

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 last year.

Will it continue like that in 2026?

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.

We ended 2025 at 84% in number of transactions relative to the 2024 (3.109 deals 2025 vs 3708 deals in 2024), the deal volume surpassed 2024 by 14% - a clear indication towards fewer but significantly bigger transactions as confirmed by a 56% increase in deal size YoY.

Large-scale M&A is clearly back at the top end of the market.

In the last 30 days alone, we’ve seen multiple $5–11B transactions, dominated by enterprise software, cybersecurity, and infrastructure-adjacent assets.

Strategic buyers (IBM, ServiceNow, Google) and large PE funds (Permira, Warburg Pincus, Hg, Stonepeak) are both active, signaling confidence that high-quality assets can absorb premium multiples.

The median EV of the top 10 deals sits at $6.2B, an order of magnitude above the broader market median, highlighting a sharp barbell between mega-deals and everything else.

What stands out is pricing discipline paired with selectivity. Enterprise software deals cluster around ~10–11x revenue, while best-in-class security assets like Armis clear materially higher multiples (~23x), reflecting scarcity and strategic value.

Outside the top tier, the overall deal market remains subdued, with a $456M median EV over the last 30 days. In other words: capital is available, but only for assets that are scaled, mission-critical, and already “public-market ready.”

Pure-play AI assets (Dataloop AI, Manus AI) clear 20–35x revenue even at relatively small deal sizes, while data-center exposure (DigitalBridge x SoftBank) trades at nearly 40x revenue, a clear signal that compute, data gravity, and model-adjacent infrastructure are the new choke points in the ecosystem.

Strategic buyers like Meta and Dell are willing to pay up early to secure capability rather than compete later.

At the same time, enterprise software remains the market’s liquidity backbone.

Large, scaled assets such as Confluent, OneStream, Clearwater, and Armis transact in the $6–11B range at ~10–11x revenue, providing valuation anchors that feel “public-market rational.”

The pattern is consistent: premiums concentrate where scarcity and strategic urgency are highest (AI, infrastructure), while everything else clears at disciplined multiples—underscoring a bifurcated M&A market rather than a broad-based recovery.

Compared to last month, multiples are (slightly) down and companies remain under pressure.

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.

The Top 10 average EV/NTM revenue declined from 23.8x in December to 22.4x in January, with the median moving from 17.5x to 16.7x.

This wasn’t driven by a growth slowdown (NTM growth remained stable at ~25%) but rather by multiple normalization as market caps came down slightly across most names.

In short: fundamentals held, prices adjusted.

The biggest moves came from AI-adjacent high-multiple leaders. Palantir’s multiple eased from ~70x to ~66x despite unchanged growth, while AppLovin, Cloudflare, and CrowdStrike all saw multiple compression of ~2–3 turns. SoundHound improved EBITDA margin meaningfully (from negative to deeply negative but trending), yet still experienced valuation pressure—suggesting profitability alone isn’t enough at this end of the curve when expectations are already extreme.

At the index level, quality remained the defining trait. Gross margins ticked up (Top 10 median from 76% to 80%) while EBITDA margins fell slightly, reflecting continued reinvestment rather than operational stress.

The takeaway is clear: January wasn’t a risk-off turn, but a reminder that even the best assets are no longer in a straight-line re-rating regime.

After some up and down in the Top 10 Median throughout H2-2025, the last 30 days have shown a closing gap between the Overall Median and Top 10 Median, indicating that top tier valuations are under pressure.

The top 50 average saw another decline from previously 12.1x to 11.4x. The trend is in line with the Top 10 average and shows that companies are under pressure across the spectrum.

Below table shows the average and median EV / NTM revenue multiples by sector.