Mega AI IPOs Worth $3.6 Trillion Poised to Fuel Startup Frenzy

As OpenAI Inc. and Anthropic PBC march toward Wall Street debuts, following the record-breaking SpaceX IPO this month, the flood of new Silicon Valley wealth could unleash a flurry of startup activity as investors and entrepreneurs chase the next big AI payday.

Taken together, the three IPOs could ultimately generate $3.6 trillion. Some of the earliest investors, executives, and co-founders at these companies will likely become instant billionaires.

Assuming an IPO valuation of more than $800 billion, a current or former employee or shareholder at these companies would need just an eighth of a percent of the company to gross more than $1 billion, according to Maya Imberg, head of thought leadership and analytics at Altrata, a global data and intelligence company. That number doesn’t take into account limitations such as lock-up periods or vesting time lines and would depend on the market price of the company, she said.

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The ripple effects of that unprecedented wealth creation undoubtedly will be felt beyond these three companies, bringing a massive cash infusion into the tech ecosystem that hasn’t been seen since the early days of the dotcom boom. That means more venture capitalists and startup founders with incredibly deep pockets looking for the next trillion dollar bet, say longtime Silicon Valley investors who have tracked the affects of new wealth across the tech economy.

“People have an insatiable appetite for more,” said Ashmeet Sidana of Engineering Capital, an early-stage Silicon Valley venture capital firm. “And I think between ambition and greed, that’s a great combination and it’ll always fuel people who need and want more.”

Cashing Out

Some of the new AI millionaire class will cash out and opt for their “private jet or one private island or one massive ranch in Montana or whatever their dream life is,” but that’s typically not the case for the young, ambitious tech elite, Sidana said. “Silicon Valley continues because there is a constant inflow of young, ambitious, thoughtful people who are willing to take a risk.”

While the amount of money pales in comparison to today’s heady AI valuations, when PayPal sold to eBay Inc. for $1.5 billion in 2002, the deal helped spawn many of today’s leading tech companies. The so-called “PayPal Mafia” including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk went on to found Palantir Technologies Inc., LinkedIn Corp., and Tesla Inc.

“All of those people started new companies. I think we’re going to see that,” said Robert Pozen, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and former vice chairman at Fidelity Investments.

Beyond individual entrepreneurs starting new ventures, he said, “On the company side, we’re going to see both—acquisitions, all- share acquisitions—and we’re going to see a tremendous build out of AI, so that that will keep going.”

Some of the earliest founders and executives of OpenAI have already done just that. They’ve started companies such as Eureka Labs, Thinking Machines Lab Inc., and Safe Superintelligence Inc. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei were both executives at OpenAI before launching Anthropic in 2021.

But the amount of money and talent going into new AI startups appeared to accelerate over the past year. Noted researchers such as David Silver, formerly of Google DeepMind, started Ineffable Intelligence Ltd. with more than $1.1 billion in seed funding. The startup Humans & AI Inc., launched by former Anthropic and Google researchers, has raised $480 million.

Growing Appetite

Overall, according to the investment tracking firm Dealroom.co, AI startups have raised more than $375 billion in the first five months of 2026, a 317% increase from the same period last year.

“There’s so much appetite in the market to pay for these products and to build new products. AI still has to be brought into so many surfaces where it does not exist,” said Harjot Gill, CEO at CodeRabbit, an AI code review startup that’s worth more than $500 million.

“This is maybe as big a deal as the internet or even bigger. And it’s not a bubble at this time. The value creation is real, the revenues are real,” said Gill, who is on his third startup.

But the massive rewards from the giant AI IPOs may not be as widespread as during the dot-com boom, said Marcus Ryu, a general partner at Battery Ventures, a Silicon Valley tech-focused venture capital and private equity firm.

“The sheer scale of these IPOs will not be quite as inspiring to entrepreneurs since they are so enormous and harder to aspire to,” he said. “There is not a large queue of other AI startups ready to go public soon afterwards.”

Still, he said, “If history is any guide, the employees who win out of these events will reinvest some of their winnings into new companies and new investment firms, and the cycle will continue. There has truly never been a better time to be a founder.”

Longtime tech entrepreneur David Chang, co-founder of Via AI, has seen a version of this story play out before. After his stint as chief operating officer with the PayPal Media Network from 2009 to 2015, Chang went on to join several boards, lead other tech companies, and work with startups as an angel investor and mentor. In total, he’s invested in more than 100 companies.

In this experience, roughly about a third of startup founders like to go and start more companies, another third will go on to join corporate boards and consulting, and the remaining third either retire or do a mix of things.

Nick Cromydas, CEO and co-founder of Hunt Club, an AI enabled executive search and recruitment firm, said he expects “a pretty dramatic formation period over the next 24 to 36 months as liquidity hits.”

“My sense is that a lot of engineers, researchers, formation teams of these larger IPOs aren’t just going to go out there and retire,” he said. “They’re going to reload.”