More consumer companies are staying private for longer, avoiding IPOs

Five years after the initial public offering boom of 2021, public markets look a lot different as more companies are choosing to stay private for longer.

In 2021, public markets saw a multitude of companies join the ranks. The Nasdaq said it welcomed 743 IPOs that year, while the New York Stock Exchange said it added more than $1 trillion in new market capitalization, marking the second straight year of record new listings.

The biggest IPOs five years ago spanned a range of industries, including Coinbase, Roblox, Rivian, Warby Parker and more.

According to research from Morningstar, the companies that went public in 2021 raised almost $500 billion — roughly double the number of deals and capital raised in 2020, a year of intense uncertainty amid the pandemic and lowered consumer and investor confidence.

But since then, the IPO market has cooled significantly. Despite a blockbuster IPO from Elon Musk‘s SpaceX, far fewer companies are choosing to go public, and some of the ones that do have struggled to gain momentum in the current conditions.

Two consumer companies, sandwich chain Jersey Mike’s and clothing retailer Reformation, went public on Thursday. Both companies had largely uneventful IPOs, with Reformation remaining essentially flat for the day and Jersey Mike’s opening $2 below its IPO pricing and closing down nearly 6%. They join just a handful of other consumer companies that have gone public in 2026, according to Renaissance, representing a tiny slice of the overall IPO pie.

Experts say there’s a range of reasons why companies are rethinking their liquidity and capital.

“There’s under 4,000 public companies today, whereas 30 years ago, there was just under 8,000,” said Mike Dinsdale, CEO of Powerlaw, a publicly listed fund investing in private companies. “The reason for that, I think, is access to capital, and then the idea that staying private and not having any transparency into what’s happening, and then higher valuations on the public side.”

Dinsdale, who previously held executive positions at DoorDash and DocuSign, said access to capital and liquidity in nonpublic markets, along with the emergence of megafunds, have taken “the need out to rush to go public.”

He added it’s a trend he’s been seeing over the past 30 years, though the acceleration of family office interest in private companies over the past five years has contributed significantly to the trend as the private investment vehicles of the ultrawealthy look for new places to put their money.  

Some of the largest consumer and retail companies have remained private, like Publix Super Markets, Sephora and Chick-fil-A.

According to Sunaina Sinha Haldea, the global head of…