Welcome to another edition of our Sunday “Resources” stream where we share our most valuable data & resources across four rotating formats:

For 1. and 3., we collaborate with best-in-class partners to ensure you get the highest quality data.

For 2. and 4., we leverage our ever-growing product portfolio and share selective snapshots of the most sought-after resources from VCSTACK.COM

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👇

Between September 2025 and October 2025, the ranking of top private companies by valuation shifted significantly, reflecting the explosive growth of AI firms.

OpenAI, which already led the September list, maintained its top spot but now shares the #1 position with Tether at an estimated $500 B valuation each. The addition of Tether and the disappearance of Reliance Retail from the top five underscore a changing landscape - with crypto and AI companies overtaking traditional sectors.

Meanwhile, SpaceX held its $400 B valuation and the #3 position, while ByteDance and Ant Group remained strong but slipped relatively as their growth rates were overshadowed by AI-focused firms.

The emergence and rise of xAI is one of the most dramatic changes between the two months. In September, xAI ranked #9 with an $80 B valuation, but by October, it had soared to #6 with a $200 B valuation. Meanwhile, Stripe rebounded from #8 ($91.5 B) to #8 again but with a higher $107 B valuation, showing strong fintech resilience amid AI euphoria. Reliance Retail fell out of the top 5, and Databricks rose to #10 with a valuation of $100 B, keeping AI and data infrastructure in the top tier.

Finally, the overall headcount trends indicate consolidation among high-growth AI firms. OpenAI grew its staff to over 7,000, maintaining 115% annual headcount growth, while Anthropic and xAI showed even more explosive expansion (+107% and +427%, respectively). Traditional giants like ByteDance and Ant Group, by contrast, exhibited modest workforce increases (under 6%).

The reshuffling of these rankings reflects a broader market shift toward AI dominance, both in valuation and in talent concentration.

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

After an active summer with companies like Figma or Klarna successfuly completing their IPOs, the last month for public listings was rather slow with only StubHub Holdings listing on 17th September. Since then, the company lost about 25% in EV.

Starting into the last quarter of 2025, we have about 80% of our 2025 IPO candidate list left. Many of whom are cueing up and hoping for the window to widen and remain open.

At least as interesting as public markets these days is M&A activity, the second path for liquidity in the private market asset class.

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.

While we’re at 70% in number of transactions relative to the FY2024 (2596 deals YTD vs 3708 deals in FY 2024), the deal volume has now surpassed the FY2024 by 4% - a clear indication towards fewer but significantly bigger transactions as confirmed by a 44% increase in deal size YoY.

Looking at the largest transactions of the last 30 days, we see the acquisition of Electronic Arts (big fan here!!) by PIG, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners for a reported $55bn, making it not only the biggest but also with an EV/NTM Rev multiple of 7.2x one of the top 10 most aggressively valued transactions. The median deal size for the month was $134m with a 2.6x EV/revenue multiple.

The acquisition of With Intelligence by S&P Global leads the top 10 highest EV/NTM Rev transactions with a reported 13.9x. That’s about double the top 10 median of 7.5x and five times the overall median of 2.6x.

Compared to last month, multiples are flat (for the first time since we started this format in March this year).

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.

In line with the top 10 private market companies, we see lots of movement in the top 10 public companies by valuation multiples too.

Movements October to September 2025

Valuation Multiples (EV / NTM Revenue)

Growth & Profitability

After a brief rebound for the Top 10 Median, the last 30 days have shown another decline and therefore a shrinking gap to the fairly consistent Overall Median, meaning that top companies receive less premium compared to previous months.

The top 50 average saw a slight decline from previously 13.7x to 13.3x. In comparison to the top 10 average which was flat month-over-month, this means that the top 10 companies are more robust than their wider peer group in the top 50.

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