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 👇

The macro picture turned less forgiving this month.

Inflation is moving the wrong way again. US CPI rose to 3.7% in September from 3.4%, pushed up by energy, while the economy added just 29,000 jobs. That is the hardest mix for a central bank, and economists now expect the Fed to follow September’s hike with another in December. Europe faces the same problem, with eurozone inflation at 3.8%.

Public markets are starting to notice. The S&P 500 is still up about 12% this year, but the Nasdaq just had its worst week since June as investors began questioning how the AI build-out will be financed at higher rates. Even SpaceX is now seeking to borrow $40B to buy Nvidia chips.

Private markets kept accelerating at the top. Venture funding reached $159B in Q3, up 53% year on year, with AI taking almost two thirds. M&A is on pace for a record year. Yet outside a handful of mega-deals, the IPO window remains shut.

October’s backdrop: money is getting more expensive, yet capital keeps concentrating in the same few names. Watch for that tension in the charts below.

Anthropic ($965B) and OpenAI ($852B) hold the top two spots for a fourth month, ahead of ByteDance ($480B), Databricks ($190B) and Stripe ($159B).

The revenue multiples tell their own story. The US and UK names trade at 19x to 34x revenue, led by OpenAI at 34.1x, while the two Chinese companies, ByteDance (2.6x) and Ant Group (3.2x), sit near 3x. Even Revolut at 19.2x is priced above the 15.6x median of the public Top 10. Private investors are paying a premium to the best public software names and applying a steep discount to Chinese scale.

Blue Origin enters at sixth with $140B, Ant Group closes the table at $79B and Anduril drops out. Just outside, Ramp raised at $60B, up from $44B in June and at most ~30x its $2B+ revenue, proof that investors still pay up outside AI when growth shows in the numbers.

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

No new listings from our table, but two status changes.

Anthropic is reportedly preparing to start marketing its IPO as early as the week of 9 November, with a Nasdaq debut before Thanksgiving that could raise around $100B. A confidential draft filing reviewed by Reuters showed nearly $4.6B of 2025 revenue against at least $518B of compute commitments, and the company reportedly told investors that Q3 revenue reached $16.8B, a ~$67B run rate.

Oura pulled its ~$2.2B IPO on the day it was due to price despite a covered book, after pushback on a valuation of about $15B and a deal where 73% of shares came from existing shareholders.

The window is open for scale and shut for nearly everyone else. Excluding SK hynix, Q3 US IPOs raised just $6.2B, according to Renaissance Capital.

YTD deal value reached $3.0T, up from $2.8T last month. With ten weeks still to go, 2026 is already the second-biggest year in the dataset, behind only 2025 ($3.1T) and ahead of 2021 ($2.9T). The growth comes from bigger cheques. The average deal is $218M, the highest since 2015 and 82% above 2024’s $120M.

The average has eased every month since July’s $265M and now sits at $218M, down from $231M in September, so deals signed since the summer have been smaller on average. It is still $44M above 2025’s average: the size premium is fading but far from gone.

PTC to Schneider Electric leads at $23,700M (8.7x revenue), Schneider’s largest deal ever, followed by Canadian Utilities to Emera ($19,663M, 7.6x) and the Penske Automotive take-private by Penske Corp and Mitsui ($16,300M).

The multiples split by business model. Software assets (PTC, Varonis, CCC) cleared 5.8x to 10.1x revenue, while retail, pharmacy, healthcare services and logistics businesses (Penske, Boots, Option Care, RXO) cleared 0.5x to 1.0x. That mix pulled the Top 10 median down to 3.4x revenue from 5.7x in September, while the median deal size barely moved ($7,739M from $7,900M). Across all deals in the last 30 days, the median slipped to 2.0x revenue from 2.3x.

IntraBio to Shionogi leads at 55.9x, which implies only about $36M of forward revenue on a $2,000M price. The next nine range from 7.6x to 16.3x.

The Top 10 median halved to 10.7x from 20.0x, and no AI deal made the list a month after Hugging Face went at 86x. Small, specialised assets filled the gap: four of the ten sit below $300M EV, including Envoy Technologies (16.3x) and ScoutDI (11.0x).

Munich-based ITM went to Telix at 8.6x ($2,350M), with up to $700M of that in contingent payments after an FDA setback. Buyers still pay premiums and push more of the price into milestones.

Compared to September, the frontier held its line-up and the sector premiums below it cooled.

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 20.4x, median 15.6x, from 21.0x and 15.5x. The line-up is unchanged after four new entries in September.

Palantir extends its lead at 38.1x on 54% growth and a 63% EBITDA margin. Cloudflare (29.8x from 33.2x) and CrowdStrike (32.8x from 34.8x) gave back part of September’s jump, while Cadence and TechnologyOne firmed at the bottom.

The Top 10 median grows 22%, twice the overall median of 11%, yet trades at 15.6x revenue against 2.2x, about seven times higher. Margins are stronger too, at 81% gross and 32% EBITDA against 68% and 20%. Twice the growth, seven times the multiple.

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