Pre-IPO market rankings

Pre-IPO market concentration: top names drive 40% of all activity

As IPO hopes for 2026 swirled around SpaceX, Anthropic, Databricks and others, investors flocked to these issues, creating an extremely top-heavy pre-IPO market. Investor interest — including bid-ask activity and completed trades — clustered intensely around SpaceX (#1) and Anthropic (#2) in particular, helping the top six names drive ⅖ of all activity on Augment. 

• The top six names — SpaceX, Anthropic, Anduril, OpenAI, Databricks, and Stripe — which have been the stalwarts at the top of these rankings, accounted for 40% of all activity across the Augment platform in Q4’25. That’s significantly higher than the previous peak of 32% seen in Q1’25. This marks the fifth quarter in a row that the top six names concentrated 25% or more of all activity on Augment. Given that IPO expectations continue to build around several sought-after companies, it’s unlikely we’ll see a return to the more broadened pre-IPO markets of early-to mid-2024.
• The top half-dozen companies in the ranking also accounted for more than half (57.7%) of activity among Power 20 companies — also a new peak. The same six names only accounted for 37% of Power 20 activity in Q3’25 and 57% in Q2’25. Just one company, SpaceX, accounted for 18.7% of Power 20 activity in Q4’25.  
• The top 10 companies, #1 SpaceX through #10 Neuralink, drove more than ⅔ of (66.9%) of Augment Power 20 activity

But the Power 20 is even more concentrated from a valuation perspective.

SpaceX ($880B) and OpenAI ($650B) alone account for closer to half (46.1%) of the Power 20’s aggregate market cap of $3.31T. Add ByteDance ($500B), and the 3 most valuable names account for 61.2% of the Power 20’s market cap. 

The quarter did see a new category break into the Power 20 in the form of prediction markets, with Kalshi (#18) and Polymarket (#19) entering for the first time. Meanwhile, Cerebras (#20) is returning to the rankings after briefly falling out in the wake of a withdrawn IPO earlier this year.

Power 20 diversifies (slightly) away from AI

Although virtually every company in the Power 20 commercializes an AI product and generates revenue with AI, we define this category conservatively to capture something close to “pure-play AI.” We limit “AI companies” to those that initially launched and built around AI-centric products.

Using this strict definition, the data shows the Power 20 diversifying away from AI slightly this quarter. That said, AI companies still dominated the top of the rankings, accounting for 2 of the top 5 companies, and 3 of the top 7.

• In all, 8 of the companies in the Power 20 were AI-first companies in Q4’25. That’s down from 10 in Q3’25, and 9 in Q1’25, but still higher than the count of 7 in Q4’24. This is not a symptom of decline in AI as a category. Rather, it’s a signal of the rise in defense tech and prediction markets, and some early consolidation among AI companies (see “Signs of consolidation in AI-linked names,” below).
• The Power 20’s eight AI names accounted for more than half (56%) of the Power 20’s aggregate market cap in Q4’25, lower than the 65.3% share of market cap AI-first companies saw in Q3’25, but still slightly higher than the 55% share in Q2’25 
• The AI-first companies had 31.2% average share price gains in Q4’25 (versus 34.5% for the Power 20 as a whole). This underscores how AI names still weigh heavily in the Power 20, and so tend to drive averages. Notably, the two outliers in positive price gains this quarter, SpaceX (+106%) and Kalshi (+151%), were not AI-first names
• In Q4’25, AI names drove 38.6% of Power 20 activity across bids, asks, and trades (see chart, below). This marked the first time since Q3’24 that AI names drove less than half of Power 20 activity. AI companies’ share of Power 20 activity last quarter was 65.3%, which turned out to be a peak. AI-first companies drove only 25% of Power 20 activity as recently as Q2’24. 

The 8 AI companies in the Power 20 drove about ¼ (26.8%) of total activity across the entire Augment platform in Q4’25

Defense and aerospace rise to drive ~⅓ of Power 20 activity

(#1) SpaceX is one of three aerospace/defense companies in the Power 20 in Q4’25, alongside Anduril (#3) and Shield AI (#15). 

Led by SpaceX, the 3 aerospace/defense companies accounted for 30.8% of Power 20 activity in Q4’25, up from 17.2% in Q3’25, spotlighting the growing role of aerospace and defense companies at the top of the pre-IPO markets. SpaceX, with an estimated market cap of $880B, on its own accounted for 18.7% of activity in the Power 20 and 13% of all activity on Augment, or roughly every 1 in 8 bids, asks, or trades on our platform. 

Saronic, which specializes in providing unmanned surface vessels to US and allied defense buyers, saw significant interest throughout 2025 and is one of the Companies to Watch in Q4’25 (see “Companies to Watch” section, below).

Prediction markets crack the rankings

‍Prediction markets debuted in the rankings with Kalshi (#18) and Polymarket (#19). Both companies were propelled by massive financing rounds and valuation step-ups in 2H’25. Between them, Kalshi and Polymarket accounted for 14.6% of Power 20 activity and 10.2% of all activity on the Augment platform.

Signs of consolidation in AI-linked names

For the first time, there are clear signs of AI consolidation in the Power 20: dealmaking is taking some companies off the table, and performance differentials are beginning to separate out the most sought-after AI names from others that are slipping in the rankings.

First, the winners: Anthropic rose one place in the rankings to the #2 spot, ending as the quarter’s second-most active name. OpenAI (#4), the world’s second-most valuable private company after SpaceX, has sat comfortably in the top 5 despite a relative scarcity of shares in secondary markets, which is bottlenecking volume (OpenAI only ranked #7 for activity). Another winner is xAI, with 73.3% price growth in the quarter.

But we have seen other AI names recently exit the market via “reverse acquihires”: In December 2025, NVIDIA struck a deal for Groq, including the licensing of its inference technology and scooping up its top talent, for $20B. Groq was in the #17 spot last quarter. A similarly-constructed deal led to Scale AI leaving the rankings after Q1’25. While not technically acquisitions, these “reverse acquihires” provide liquidity to investors and kneecap companies’ independent commercial prospects, leading us to remove them from the rankings.

Meanwhile, (#17) Perplexity dropped 5 spots in the rankings in Q4’25, with significantly weaker activity, price, and market signals relative to many of its Power 20 peers, including frontier lab leaders OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Perplexity also ended the quarter as the only Power 20 name with negative price growth in the quarter.

Despite more than doubling revenue in the first nine months of 2025 to more than $200M ARR, Glean, formerly at #14 in Q3’25, dropped out of the top 20 (see “Companies to Watch” section, below). Glean saw activity levels significantly lower than its Power 20 peers, and mostly flat price action in the quarter.

Most-active names

Looking solely at interest and volume — including bid-ask activity and trades on our platform — AI-first companies accounted for 4 of the 10 most-active names: Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, and Groq. If we excluded Groq because of the NVIDIA deal (see “Signs of consolidation,” above), xAI would make the list at #10.

Looking only at completed trades, Anthropic, Kalshi, and Cursor AI ranked 1 to 3, respectively (SpaceX and Shield AI are tied for #4).

Most Active Companies in Q4’25*

*Includes overall bid-ask and trading activity on the Augment platform during all of Q4’25. Any ties in bid-ask activity are broken by upranking the name with the most completed trades.

Largest price gains

Kalshi’s per-share Augment Price growth of 150.6% was by a significant margin the highest among Power 20 companies. Only SpaceX, at 106.1%, also saw triple-digit price gains.

xAI (73.3%), Anthropic (62.1%), and Polymarket (53.2%) rounded out the top five for price jumps in the quarter.

Highest % Augment Share Price Increases in Q4’25*
Excludes companies with low overall activity

Up-and-coming companies

Polymarket and Kalshi were both Companies to Watch in the previous quarter and graduated into the Power 20 in Q4’25, thanks to strong activity, price appreciation, and impressive volume growth in both prediction markets. Based on overall marketplace activity in Q4’25, price movement, commercial traction, and news, these are the five up-and-coming names to watch in the beginning of 2026: X-Energy, Glean, Saronic, Cognition AI (Devin), and Harvey. They are ranked in the table below according to overall activity in the quarter.

• X-Energy, a nuclear energy company developing small modular reactors, raised $700M in an oversubscribed Series D round in November 2025 led by Jane Street. The company recorded more transactions on Augment in Q4’25 than many of the ranked names, making it the most-active up-and-coming name for the quarter.
• Glean maintained a significant secondary market presence with balanced buy and sell-side participation, including completed transactions. December 2025  the company reported hitting $200M in ARR in $110M at year-end 2024. $200M ARR. Despite the revenue milestones, the enterprise AI search platform did not see significant price growth in the quarter.
• Robotics attention shifted toward foundational software, after hardware dominated earlier activity and headlines. Apptronik, a robot hardware company, ranked 6th for activity on Augment in Q4 after placing 23rd in Q3, but the year-end headlines belonged to the software layer. In December, Skild AI — a robotics foundation model company — reportedly entered talks with SoftBank and Nvidia to raise over $1B at a $14B valuation, which would mean tripling its $4.7B valuation from earlier in 2025. The potential deal sparked immediate secondary market interest as Skild addresses a critical bottleneck: the lack of universal software to serve as the brain for general-purpose robots, a gap that has slowed deployment of autonomous machines across factories, businesses, and homes.
• Cognition AI, the developer of the Devin coding agent, announced a new pilot at Goldman Sachs in Q4’25, and counts several  other major enterprise customers including Goldman Sachs, Citi, Dell, Cisco, Ramp, and Palantir, positioning Devin as a direct competitor to Cursor AI (#14 in the Power 20) and agentic coding products from Anthropic (#2), OpenAI (#4), and xAI (#7). The company hit a $10B valuation in Q3'25, just one quarter after acquiring the assets of competitor Windsurf and doubling its ARR, another mark of consolidation in the increasingly competitive AI market in 2025.
• Defense tech continued its strong showing across the watchlist and Power 20. Saronic, the autonomous naval vessel manufacturer, saw significant demand on Augment in Q4 and secured a $392M U.S. Navy production contract for its Corsair autonomous surface vessel in December 2025, with production expected in under 12 months. The company also announced a $300M investment to expand its Louisiana shipyard by 300K square feet. Defense companies have consistently performed: Shield AI (#15) entered the Power 20 in Q3’25 after first appearing on the Companies to Watch list in Q2'25, while Anduril (#3) and SpaceX (#1) continue in the top five. The pattern suggests sustained investor appetite for autonomous defense systems and space infrastructure as the current US administration continues to double down on high-tech defense spending.
• Nuclear energy and legal AI saw major funding rounds despite limited secondary activity. X-Energy led Companies to Watch for Q4’25 activity and transactions after raising $700M in an oversubscribed Series D in November. The company claims an orderbook exceeding 11 GW with projects involving Dow, Amazon, and others. Meanwhile, Harvey, the legal AI platform, raised $160M in December at an $8B valuation — up from $5B in June —  marking $760M raised total in 2025 as one of the year's most aggressive funding runs. Sacra estimates Harvey tripled ARR to $150M by November 2025.

Methodology

For further detail, the ranking methodology includes 8 metrics in total. Companies were ranked by the following factors, normalized to a 0 to 1 scale:

• Total volume as measured by the size of bid and ask orders on the Augment platform in Q4'25.
• Total activity was based on the number of bid-ask orders and the number of trades. Trades weighed 2x, whereas bids and asks weighed 1x.
• Companies' revenue and revenue growth estimates are collected from Sacra, a third-party market data provider (please see "Revenue estimates" section at the bottom of this page for more detail). Companies' metrics were normalized and ranked on a 0 to 1 scale according to revenue and revenue growth in 2024.

• Spreads were measured as the negative of volume-weighted average price (VWAP) price differences between asks and bids, as a percentage of the asking price, for each name in Q4'25.
• Price change was measured as the % difference ending Augment Price for each name in the previous quarter and the ending price in the current calendar quarter.

In the next step, all the percentile ranks were added together with adjustments made to account for companies with gaps in the data, e.g. missing 2023 and/or 2024 revenue. Price spread, revenue growth, and the previous quarter's aggregate rank are weighted approximately twice as much as the other factors, while revenue dollar amount is weighted one-tenth as much.

Unlike our Power 20 ranking, our "Up-and-Coming Companies" list is based on fewer factors, namely price movement, activity, and activity increases QoQ. The activity includes transactions involving SPVs and forwards. The ranking is meant to identify companies seeing noticeably elevated buy and sell interest in the quarter compared to previous quarters.

Our overall activity rankings, “Most Active Companies in Q4’25”  also include transactions involving SPVs and forwards, as well as trades. The ranking is meant to identify companies seeing noticeably elevated buy and sell interest in addition to trading activity in the quarter compared to previous quarters. For this measure, trades and bid-ask activity are weighted equally. The “Highest % Price Increases in Q4 '25” table excludes companies with low activity, meaning companies with less than 3 bids or asks in the quarter.

Revenue estimates

All revenue estimates in this document are based on data from Sacra.com. All estimates are based on current information and subject to change. These figures are not guarantees of future performance.

Sacra utilizes data from media reports, company press releases and articles, and public filings to create its estimates of companies' historical revenue trajectories. The estimates are based on publicly-available information, but may not account for additional factors specific to individual companies' market and operations.