Crypto company Circle ripped through the New York Stock Exchange on June 5, launching what has become the loudest comeback for tech IPOs since the 2021 peak. Backed by Accel, Breyer Capital, and General Catalyst, Circle’s stock opened strong, then exploded. Now it’s up six times its IPO price, sitting on a $42 billion market cap. That rally shoved three years of frozen IPO dreams back onto the table. This surge didn’t happen in isolation. Halfway into June, the US Senate passed the GENIUS Act , laying out a federal rulebook for stablecoins tied to the dollar. That legislation sent Circle’s price into orbit. Accel, Breyer, and General Catalyst, even after trimming a bit of their holdings, now control $8 billion in Circle stock. VCs finally get exits after brutal dry spell Tech IPOs slammed to a halt in early 2022. Inflation climbed, rates rose, and deals vanished as the US and Europe clamped down harder on corporate takeovers. Big buyers backed off. That’s when venture capital firms got stuck holding onto companies with no clean exits. They’ve waited ever since. But now, in the first half of 2025, that freeze is finally starting to crack. June alone saw five tech IPOs, more than double the monthly pace since January. The boost didn’t come from just one name. CoreWeave, an AI infrastructure company, went public in March, did nothing at first, then jumped 170% in May and another 47% in June. Eric Hippeau, managing partner at Lerer Hippeau, said the change is overdue. “It’s refreshing and something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” Eric said. “I’m not sure that we are confident that this can be a sustained trend yet, but it’s been very encouraging.” The last good year for IPOs was 2021. Back then, 155 venture-backed companies in the US pulled in over $60 billion. The next year? Just 13 IPOs. Then came 18 in 2023, and 30 last year. Combined, they didn’t even reach $14 billion, based on data from Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida. The slowdown came straight after the Federal Reserve launched an aggressive rate hike campaign to beat down inflation. It worked, but it crushed the IPO market. Major firms prepare for public debuts while others stay private Some smaller IPOs did manage to sneak through. Hinge Health is valued at $3.5 billion, Omada Health around $1 billion, Etoro passed $5 billion, and Chime Financial is just under $11.5 billion. But none of them matched Circle’s scale or speed. Omada’s stock even fell below its offering price. Some of the biggest names in tech haven’t budged. SpaceX, Stripe, and Databricks are still private. OpenAI and Anthropic keep grabbing huge checks but aren’t showing any signs of going public. Still, venture firms say plenty of others are waiting in line. Rick Heitzmann, partner at FirstMark, said, “The IPO market is starting to open and the VC world is cautiously optimistic. We are preparing companies for the next wave of public offerings.” While VCs wait, some are cashing out through secondary sales, a way to dump shares to new investors before the IPO. Others are banking on strategic moves—like the one by Mark Zuckerberg last month. In June, Meta spent $14 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI. It wasn’t a regular deal. Meta scooped up the company’s founder Alexandr Wang and a few key engineers. That deal cleared out half the shares held by early investors, giving them a chance to cash in now and maybe again later. Accel, who led Scale AI’s Series A in 2017, could walk away with over $2.5 billion. Index Ventures joined the Series B in 2018, and Founders Fund, led by Peter Thiel, ran the Series C in 2019, when the company was already worth over $1 billion. There’s hope that rate cuts might come next. But the Fed hasn’t committed. There’s also talk between US exchanges and the SEC about loosening IPO rules, but nothing official has been announced. Last week, Reuters reported that these discussions are meant to make public offerings more appealing again. Even so, some IPOs are on pause. Klarna and StubHub postponed their listings in April because of tariff concerns and geopolitical risks. Neither company has given a new timeline. But for now, it’s clear that the dry years are fading. “There’s starting to be kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” said Eric from Lerer Hippeau. That light started with crypto’s Circle. KEY Difference Wire : the secret tool crypto projects use to get guaranteed media coverage
