Seattle Tech Week returns July 27–31, bringing together founders, operators, and investors across nearly 200 events citywide. Liquidity planning is one of the topics we expect to come up constantly this year, for good reason. The numbers below show why founders can no longer plan around a single exit path, and why the ones building optionality now are the ones with real choices later.
1. The IPO window doesn't just open or close, it can swing from a multi-year low to nine figures in the same year
Renaissance Capital's 2025 U.S. IPO Market Annual Review counted 202 IPOs pricing in 2025, raising a combined $44 billion, a four-year high for new issuance. But the pace inside that year was anything but steady: PwC's U.S. Capital Markets Watch found just 34 traditional IPOs raised $14.8 billion in the first half of 2025, compared with 65 IPOs raising roughly $114.2 billion in the first half of 2026, nearly an eightfold jump in dollars raised in a single year. By mid-July 2026, full-year U.S. IPO proceeds had already reached $141.2 billion, within reach of 2021's full-year record of $142.4 billion, powered by mega-deals. A market that can swing this hard, this fast, isn't one a company can plan around by simply “waiting for the window.”
2. Companies are staying private for a lot longer than they used to
Forge Global's October 2025 institutional research found that the median age of a company at IPO was 13.5 years in 2024, up from just four years in 1999. California tells a similar story at a shorter time horizon: the median age of a California company at IPO sat around eight years from 2010–2016 and has climbed into the 9–10 year range since 2017, according to the California Legislative Analyst's Office. The rounds themselves are taking longer to close, too: Fenwick's Q1 2026 Venture Beacon, produced in partnership with Carta, found that the median time between Seed and Series A financings remained elevated compared to historical norms even as broader fundraising conditions stabilized heading into 2026. Longer private lifecycles, and longer gaps between rounds, mean more time operating with public-company-level scrutiny before ever touching a public market.
3. M&A remains the default exit, even in a stronger year for IPOs
Startup M&A was strong in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with exits cumulatively valued north of $56.6 billion, the third-highest quarter for startup M&A since the 2022 downturn, even as the IPO market that same quarter was comparatively lackluster, according to Crunchbase. By mid-2026, acquirers had spent at least $119.8 billion buying private, venture-backed U.S. companies, putting the year on pace to exceed 2025's record. The single clearest illustration: SpaceX priced a record-breaking $75 billion IPO in June 2026, then turned around and closed a $60 billion acquisition of AI coding tool Cursor and its parent company, Anysphere; the largest startup acquisition ever recorded. The same company, in the same year, used both playbooks. That's optionality in action.
4. Secondary transaction volume has become a liquidity channeling its own right and it's still growing into 2026
Forge Global's research found that secondary market volume has grown roughly fourfold over the past decade, with the total mid- and late-stage private company value it tracks climbing from $421 billion in 2015 to $4.1 trillion as of the third quarter of 2025, about 7.8% of S&P 500 market cap. Investment bank Lazard estimates the broader global secondary market grew 53% year over year, from $152 billion in 2024 to $233 billion in 2025 and William Blair's 2026 Secondary Market Report, released in March, found the market's “record-breaking run” continuing, with market insiders now projecting roughly $250 billion in total volume for 2026. Secondaries have gone from a workaround to a core part of the liquidity toolkit, and the growth hasn't leveled off yet.
5. Tender offers surged during the IPO drought and haven't slowed since
Carta's State of Private Markets: 2025 in Review found that startups on its platform conducted 396 tender offers during 2025 (up 62% from 2024) with nearly 20% of those offerings coming from companies at Series E or later. Nasdaq Private Market separately reported executing nearly $15 billion in tender offer volume of its own in 2025, up from roughly $3 billion in 2023. Even with IPOs back in the headlines, that liquidity habit hasn't reversed. Companies that built the muscle for a tender aren't giving it up now that the public markets are open again.
6. But secondary liquidity is highly concentrated and access isn't guaranteed
Hiive's State of the Pre-IPO Market: 2026 Annual Report found that roughly 80% of private-market trading volume in 2025 was concentrated in just the top 20 securities by transaction volume, a level of concentration essentially unchanged from 2024. That's true even as the market broadened in other ways: Hiive recorded a record 150 companies trading on its platform in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone. In other words, more companies are getting some trading activity, but the volume and the leverage that comes with it still belongs to a small handful of names. The bar for “secondary-ready” is real: governance, reporting, and clean cap tables are what separate the companies that can run a tender or attract secondary demand from the many that can't.
7. The gap between top performers and everyone else keeps widening and only the winners get real optionality
Fenwick's Q1 2026 Venture Beacon found that median Seed and Series A valuations hit record highs in 2025, but the spread between median and top-quartile companies widened further over the same period. At the seed stage, the gap between 50th- and 90th-percentile pre-money valuations grew materially, with Series A financings showing a similar trend. In other words, the strong headline valuation numbers increasingly describe the winners, not the market as a whole. Readiness, including governance, reporting, and IP infrastructure built well before a transaction is what separates the companies that get to choose their moment from the ones that don't.
Wrapping Up
The thread running through all seven data points: Optionality isn't something a company decides on the eve of a transaction, it's something built years ahead of it, through governance, reporting discipline, and a clean IP and contractual record. None of it guarantees a specific outcome. What it does is guarantee is a choice.
Continue the conversation with Fenwick at Seattle Tech Week 2026 (July 27–31). With nearly 200 founder- and operator-led events across the city, it's the right place to talk through what liquidity readiness actually looks like for your company. Registration and the full event calendar are live at SeattleTechWeek.com.