By Paul R. La Monica

Shades of 1999, anyone? A company with a ".com" in its name is going public, the latest test of the red-hot IPO market.

EquipmentShare.com, a company that rents construction equipment both online and at physical branches, is set to make its Wall Street debut on Friday. It will be looking to capitalize on the resurgence of the IPO market last year, a surge led by the likes of Circle Internet Group and CoreWeave.

EquipmentShare.com priced its initial public offering of 30.5 million shares at $24.50, the midpoint of its projected range. The company and existing shareholers will raise $747 million from the stock sale.

At the IPO price, EquipmentShare.com would be valued at about $6.2 billion, making the offering the debut of yet another so-called unicorn -- the term used to describe startups with a valuation of at least $1 billion. The stock will trade under the ticker symbol EQPT on the Nasdaq.

The EquipmentShare.com IPO will serve as a test for just how strong demand for new stocks is.

According to its IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, EquipmentShare.com generated $2.8 billion in sales during the first three quarters of 2025, up 27% from a year earlier.

But the company reported a net loss of $25.2 million in the first nine months of last year. It did post both an operating profit and positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, in the first three quarters of 2025. And it was profitable in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

The company could use some of the proceeds from the offering to make acquisitions in what is still a very fragmented industry. EquipmentShare.com has three big rivals: United Rentals; Sunbelt Rentals, which is owned by the U.K.'s Ashtead Group; and Herc Holdings. EquipmentShare.com said in its latest SEC filing that it and those three competitors collectively have about a 40% share of the construction rental market in the U.S.

EquipmentShare.com's IPO comes one day after another unicorn, the cryptocurrency firm BitGo, went public on the New York Stock Exchange. BitGo shares quickly surged more than 35% in their first few minutes of trading but fizzled as the day wore on, closing with just a 3% gain. The stock fell below its IPO price of $18 in early trading Friday.

That somewhat tepid debut, plus lackluster performances for StubHub, Klarna, Wealthfront and other IPOs in late 2025, shouldn't prevent other companies from going public this year. Satellite maker York Space Systems, Brazilian digital bank PicPay, and the online life insurer Ethos Technologies are all currently on tap to begin trading next week.

And several giant unicorns are waiting in the wings. Elon Musk's SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, the cloud platform Databricks, and the payments processing company Stripe are all said to be potential IPO candidates for later this year.

Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com

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January 23, 2026 11:02 ET (16:02 GMT)

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