Oura pulled its $2.2bn IPO, and the rest of the queue is waiting for Anthropic

Oura, the maker of a ring that tracks sleep and health, postponed its Nasdaq listing on 29 September, “despite strong demand, due to uncertainty in the IPO market”, Yahoo Finance reported. The company had launched the deal on 21 September. It planned to raise up to $2.2bn by selling 50 million shares at $40 to $44 each.

Oura does not need the money in a hurry. The company says that it is profitable, that it has 5.7 million paying members and that it expects revenue to grow 90% in its 2026 financial year. Tom Hale, the chief executive, said that the company has “the luxury of choosing our moment”.

That phrase describes the whole IPO market this autumn. Companies that can wait are waiting, and the largest reason has a name. Anthropic, the developer of the Claude models, is preparing a listing that could value it at more than $2 trillion, according to a prospectus seen by Reuters. Reuters reported that the debut will probably come after the US midterm elections on 3 November.

One deal the size of half a year

The deal is big enough to bend the calendar around it. Anthropic wants to raise as much as or more than SpaceX did in its record listing, Bloomberg reported. SpaceX raised $86.2bn in June. US listings have raised $161.4bn so far this year, excluding blank-check companies, the most since 2021. One sale of the SpaceX size would equal more than half of that total.

A deal of that size takes the attention of the investors that every other issuer needs. Some companies and their owners avoided moving their plans forward close to the expected Anthropic filing, Bloomberg reported, because they found it hard to get the attention of long-term investors and sovereign wealth funds. West Riggs, head of equity capital markets at Truist, said that companies are “simply being patient and waiting for the right window”.

The queue is already long. Of the more than two dozen companies that filed publicly for a US listing with a large bank since the start of July, only nine had gone public by 22 September. By then there had been just three debuts since Labor Day. Holtec, a nuclear services company, and Bamboo Insurance also postponed their offerings this month.

The Anthropic deal is also a test for all of them. If it sells well and trades well, it shows that large investors still pay high prices for fast growth, and the window opens for the rest. If it trades badly, the window closes. For a profitable company, a few months of delay cost little. A listing in the same weeks as the largest IPO ever could cost a lot more.

What the prospectus shows

The filing, reported by Reuters on 28 September, shows a net loss of nearly $42bn for 2025. About $34bn of that was an accounting charge: it reflects a rise in the estimated value of financing that could later turn into shares, not money spent to run the business. The operating loss was $8.06bn, up from $2.98bn in 2024, on revenue that rose twelvefold to nearly $4.6bn.

The larger number is the future bill. Anthropic expects to spend at least $518bn with six partners on computing and infrastructure over about a decade, and it cannot cancel about 80% of that sum, The Next Web reported from the Reuters reports. That is more than 110 times its 2025 revenue. The company has grown fast since then: revenue reached $11.5bn in the second quarter of 2026, CNBC reported in August. At that pace, the obligations still equal about 11 years of revenue.

Two customers made up nearly a quarter of revenue in 2025. The company also warned that many of its largest clients are not on long-term contracts.

Rates are the other problem

Higher interest rates hurt the kind of company that usually lists. “The recent spike in yields and resumed rate hikes have put some downward pressure on growth companies, and that’s a majority of the companies in the IPO market,” Avery Marquez of Renaissance Capital told Yahoo Finance. The 10-year Treasury yield closed at 5.24% on 28 September, and the Fed raised rates this month and pencilled in one more increase.

Recent listings have not given investors much reason to hurry. Shares in five of the ten largest US listings this year trade below their IPO price, according to Bloomberg data. SpaceX sold its shares at $135, rose 19% on its first day to $160, and now trades at about $147.

What to watch

Accelevation, a data centre infrastructure company, planned to price its IPO on 29 September. Its first days of trade will show how much appetite is left for AI-related deals. The public version of the Anthropic prospectus will fix the size and the timing of the sale. The Fed meets on 27 and 28 October, and a second increase would make the wait longer. OpenAI, which filed confidentially in June, is expected to list by early 2027, so the two AI labs could shape the IPO calendar well into next year.