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The IPO has long been read as the moment private investors hand the baton to public markets and recover their capital. That reading has always been imprecise. Lock-up periods, staged secondary sales and the ambitions of the companies themselves mean the journey from filing to limited-partner cash takes at least quarters, but often years.

Public holdings as a share of fund NAV had fallen to record lows for both buyout and venture capital by late 2024, sitting at 5.0% and 6.7%, respectively. That began to change in June 2026 when SpaceX, representing approximately 5% of the MSCI Global Venture Capital Closed-end Fund Index, went public. It was a single corporate event large enough to reverse much of the multiyear decline.

With a pipeline of anticipated megacap listings, Anthropic, OpenAI and other large venture-backed names among them, public holdings could account for an estimated 20% of global VC fund valuations, taking their share from a record low toward the upper end of its historical range in a relatively short period.

This emerging class of IPOs makes the gap between milestone and liquidity starker still. These companies are listing not primarily to let investors and insiders out, but to raise new capital at scale for the computing infrastructure their next phase demands. Distributions should follow, but investors may have to wait.

For those allocated across both public and private markets, the same AI-driven dynamic is playing out on both ends of the liquidity spectrum: a shrinking group of companies accounting for a growing share of returns.