A REIT, Insurer, and Bank Are Set to Go Public. The IPO Market Is More Than Tech

Dow Jones
Sep 29

The stock market rally is no longer just about artificial intelligence and the Magnificent Seven—or the “Fine Nine” if you throw in Broadcom and Oracle.

Bank stocks, the consumer discretionary sector and small-caps have all outperformed the S&P 500 over the past three months. And now it looks like this broadening trade could soon include initial public offerings as well.

The IPO market has been red hot this summer, led by companies in buzzy tech niches such as stablecoin provider Circle Internet Group, design software firm Figma, and crypto exchange Bullish. But investors looking for more diversification in the IPO market will have their pick the week starting Sept. 29.

Real estate investment trust/nuclear energy firm Fermi, backed by former Texas governor and U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, is on tap to go public. To be sure, there is an AI angle to Fermi. But that isn’t the case as much for flood insurer Neptune and community bank Commercial Bancgroup. If these offerings do well, other companies in non-tech industries could look to go public later this year or in 2026 as well.

Another non-tech firm, medical supplies giant Medline, is reported to be looking at an IPO soon and could raise $5 billion from the stock sale. That would be the largest IPO of the year and would come shortly after medical imaging and diagnostics company Heartflow enjoyed a solid debut. That would be a healthy sign for the broader market.

“An open IPO window says a lot about general market sentiment. Most private companies cannot go public anytime they want,” said Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research in a report Friday. “Rather, they must wait for when investors are bullish enough to entertain the idea of buying a company with no public market track record.”

Colas conceded that IPOs are risky and many of them don’t pan out. But he says the rebound in IPO activity is a good sign about market sentiment and added that many of today’s market leaders are companies that have gone public in just the past two decades, including Amazon.com, Alphabet, Broadcom, Meta Platforms, Nvidia, and Tesla.

Of course, this is not to suggest that Circle, Figma or other 2025 IPO success stories like CoreWeave and blockchain lender Figure are going to be among the most valuable companies in the world in 2050. But even if these or other recent IPOs flounder over the longer-term, the fact that more private companies are seeking to go public now is a bullish sign.

“Granted, only a few really work out, but that handful generate powerful compounded returns over time. From the standpoint of a long run public equity holder, one wants as many IPOs as possible,” Colas wrote.

And it helps that the demand for IPOs is not just about crypto and AI.

Mark Lehmann, CEO of Citizens California—a subsidiary of regional bank Citizens that helps advise private companies looking to go public— told Barron’s that his firm has a dozen companies in its backlog looking to go public between now and the end of the year and that there is ”diversity in terms of sectors.”

To that end, Citizens is an underwriter for Navan, an expense and corporate travel services start-up that filed to go public earlier this month.

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