SpaceX is filing for its IPO. The window is officially open.

This Week in Private Markets

The IPO clock just started.

As we blurbed yesterday, SpaceX is reportedly targeting a confidential IPO filing with the SEC as early as this month, with a potential June listing targeting a valuation above $1.75 trillion. A confidential filing lets the company work through regulatory feedback before its financials go public — standard procedure, but a meaningful step. The offering could raise as much as $50 billion, which would surpass Saudi Aramco's $29 billion record from 2019.

At $1.75 trillion, SpaceX would be larger than every publicly traded company on earth except Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon.

For secondary market participants, this is the moment the process becomes official. SpaceX has historically managed liquidity through bi-annual tender offers — the most recent in December at $421/share. A confidential filing kicks off the sequence that eventually puts a market-clearing public price on shares that have been trading by appointment.

The Big Story: Anduril Raises $4B — Doubling in Nine Months

If SpaceX's filing is the week's headline, Anduril's raise is the week's signal.

Anduril is raising approximately $4 billion at a $60 billion valuation, co-led by a16z and Thrive Capital, with Founders Fund and Lux Capital also participating. Nine months ago, the company was valued at $30.5 billion. Revenue was on track to double to about $2 billion last year, driven by U.S. and allied defense contracts.

The capital will support Anduril's Arsenal-1 manufacturing complex in Ohio — a facility designed to mass-produce aerial and maritime drones at scale, which the company has indicated could be operational as early as July.

The context matters: this comes just days after founder Palmer Luckey publicly criticized Anthropic's position in the Pentagon AI standoff, and as the U.S. military is actively deploying autonomous systems in the Middle East. The round negotiations predated all of that, but the timing reinforces Anduril's positioning as the defense tech company with no ambivalence about its customer.

One data point worth sitting with: Anduril has raised over $10 billion in total capital and is approaching a $60 billion valuation. That's a capital efficiency ratio — roughly 6x — that most enterprise software companies would envy, achieved in a sector that requires physical manufacturing, not just code.

OpenAI: $25B Revenue, IPO Lawyers, New Model — All in One Week

OpenAI had a busy 72 hours.

The company crossed $25 billion in annualized revenue as of late February — a 17% jump from $21.4 billion at year-end 2025, per The Information. OpenAI also retained Cooley and Wachtell Lipton to prepare for an IPO that could come as soon as Q4 2026 — one of the first concrete steps toward a public listing.

And then there's GPT-5.4.

OpenAI launched GPT-5.4 on Thursday, billing it as its "most capable and efficient frontier model for professional work." The model consolidates advanced reasoning, coding from GPT-5.3-Codex, and — for the first time in a general-purpose model — native computer-use capabilities. It achieves a 75% success rate on OSWorld-Verified, a desktop navigation benchmark, surpassing the 72.4% human performance benchmark. The API supports up to 1 million tokens of context.

The enterprise targeting is pointed. OpenAI also launched direct integrations with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets — a direct challenge to Anthropic's Cowork, which triggered a SaaS selloff when it launched earlier this year. OpenAI's CFO has said she expects enterprise customers to grow from 40% to 50% of revenue by year-end.

For private markets investors, the revenue and IPO counsel news matters more than the model. OpenAI's competitor Anthropic has reached around $9 billion in annualized revenue — a meaningful gap, though Anthropic's enterprise mix (reportedly 80%+) is stronger. Both companies are building toward the same destination: a public market that will force a real comparison of their underlying businesses, not just their valuations.

Anthropic: Still Talking

The Pentagon standoff is not over.

Dario Amodei told investors this week that Anthropic is still in "productive conversations" with the DoD, aiming to reach "some agreement that works for us and works for them." The formal supply-chain risk designation — which would require defense contractors to certify they're not using Claude — remains in place, and Amodei has said the company intends to challenge it in court.

The broader question for investors: the $200 million Pentagon contract is not a major blow to a company on track to generate at least $18 billion in revenue this year. The larger concern is the extent to which the supply-chain designation forces other enterprises with Pentagon exposure to stop using Anthropic's technology.

Situation to watch, not panic about — but worth tracking heading into the IPO window. However, it’s worth nothing that Anthropic’s Pentagon counterpart has denied talks are ongoing:

Quick Takes

OpenAI IPO could come as soon as Q4 — The company retained Cooley and Wachtell Lipton as counsel. Combined with the $25B revenue announcement, the IPO machinery is clearly in motion.

Vast Space raises $500M to build commercial space station — The International Space Station retires in 2030. Balerion Space Ventures led the round. NASA is expected to transition to commercial operators, making this a government-contracted infrastructure play dressed up as a venture deal.

Together AI reportedly raising ~$1B at $7.5B valuation — The AI infrastructure company's annualized revenue has reportedly hit $1B, up 3x from mid-2025. A clean signal that the AI infrastructure layer — compute, inference, tooling — is monetizing independently of the foundation model race.

Decagon completes employee tender at $4.5B valuation — Same price as the company's recently closed Series D. Price parity between primary and secondary is increasingly the expectation in healthy private markets, not the exception.

📊 Data Point of the Day

$25 billion

OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate as of late February — a 17% jump in two months, per The Information. For context: Anthropic is at roughly $9 billion. Databricks crossed $3 billion in ARR in 2024. The gap between the frontier AI labs and everyone else in the category is widening faster than most expected.

🎓 Manual

Confidential Filing (S-1)

When a company files for an IPO, it submits a registration statement — the S-1 — to the SEC. A confidential filing lets the company submit a draft S-1, receive regulatory feedback, and make changes before the document becomes public. The company must publicly release the filing at least 15 days before beginning its IPO roadshow. The process is commonly used by companies that want flexibility to delay or adjust without the reputational cost of a stale public document. SpaceX is expected to use it precisely because the xAI integration adds complexity to the financial disclosures.

What We're Watching

1. SpaceX's actual filing date — Bloomberg set a March target. Whether the xAI merger adds complexity that pushes the timeline is the key variable. A June listing stays on track only if the filing happens in the next few weeks, and a protracted war in Iran could further complicate that timing.
2. Anthropic's legal challenge — The company has pledged to contest the supply-chain designation in court. Parallel de-escalation talks with the Pentagon continue. How this resolves — and on what timeline — shapes the IPO story heading into H2.
3. GPT-5.4 enterprise uptake — OpenAI is explicitly targeting Anthropic's enterprise stronghold with native computer-use and spreadsheet integrations. The next few months of revenue data will tell us whether the product gap is closing.

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