Clear Street Upcoming IPO: Modern prime broker withdraws S-1

While many fintech companies add a sleek layer at the consumer level, like neobanks that provide user-friendly mobile banking access, Clear Street has been focusing on modernizing the behind-the-scenes financial infrastructure that makes transactions like trading stocks possible.

The cloud-native prime broker (a type of financial institution that provides services such as financing, clearing, and custody to institutional clients like hedge funds and other brokerages) has quickly grown into a major player on Wall Street and was gearing up for a large IPO in early 2026. Initially, in February the company was planning to raise up to $1.05 billion at an $11.8 billion valuation.³

However, it reportedly got some investor pushback and scaled back its offering a week later,⁴ dropping its fundraising target by 65% and its valuation to around $7.2 billion at the top end of its range.⁵ Yet just hours later that same day, Clear Street ended up postponing the IPO due to "market conditions."⁶ A week later, it fully withdrew its IPO filing.⁷

Still, Clear Street has seen a lot of growth since its founding, and it seems plausible that the startup will refile again in the future, particularly if the IPO market heats up.

Clear Street: Company background

Clear Street, based in New York, was founded in 2018 by Uriel Cohen, Chris Pento, and Sachin Kumar. Cohen was a co-founder of Alpine Global Management, an investment firm, where he ran into challenges with a prime broker's legacy technology systems that were causing errors that cost the firm money.⁸

Ultimately, he got together with Pento and Kumar, who also had finance backgrounds, to create a new type of prime broker that would be cloud-native and API-first, rather than built on the COBOL language that much of the finance world runs on but which has become largely outdated.⁹

In 2020, the company bought a broker, CenterPoint Securities, to serve as its own client to help prove out Clear Street's prime brokerage capabilities.¹⁰ In 2023, the company also launched investment banking and strategic advisory services.¹¹

The company also went through a leadership change in 2024, with Ed Tilly, former CEO of Cboe Global Markets, succeeding Clear Street co-founder Pento as CEO.¹²

Real-time, Cloud-based asset services

Clear Street was founded to solve the problem of capital markets infrastructure largely being based on 1960s-1980s technology, which often means fewer employees now understand how these really work, and they're often not built to keep up with modern finance.¹³

So, Clear Street came in with the idea of taking advantage of the advent of public APIs and cloud computing. Even though those technologies also aren't all that new, they're more aligned with the digital world and modern ways of working.¹⁴ And while legacy banks have been investing in modernization, it would be expensive and risky for them to fully overhaul their systems at their roots overnight.¹⁵ But Clear Street, as a startup, was able to build this new type of system from scratch.

The result is that clients gain real-time, unified visibility into areas such as positions, collateral, exposures, etc., across services like trading, clearing, and financing, and it has led to fast growth for Clear Street.

The company's S-1 revealed that in September 2025, Clear Street supported over 2,000 clients with over $31.3 billion in daily trading activity. Clear Street also had $783.7 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2025, which was a 160% gain year over year. The company also had $157.2 million in net income, compared to $89.1 million for the full year of 2024.¹⁶

Clear Street stock price history

At this time, Clear Street's Forge Price is unknown. Check back here or create an account with Forge for more updates on Clear Street's stock price history, as well as more valuation information.

Forge Price is a derived data point that reflects the up-to-date price performance of venture-backed, late-stage companies, and is calculated based on a proprietary model incorporating pricing inputs from primary funding round information, secondary market transactions, and indications of interest (IOIs) on Forge.

Clear Street funding history and private market valuation

Clear Street has raised around $885 million in primary funding rounds over its history, starting with a Series A in 2021 that brought in $24 million at a $480 million valuation.¹⁷

From 2022 to 2024, Clear Street raised its Series B in multiple tranches, pulling in a total of $726.09 million and bringing its valuation up to $2.1 billion. Investors included IMC Investments, Prysm Capital, NextGen Venture Partners, and Walleye Capital, among several others.¹⁷

Most recently, Clear Street closed its Series C in January 2026, with investment from SBI Holdings and Baillie Gifford. This round raised $135.39 million at a $12 billion valuation.¹⁷

Looking ahead

Although Clear Street has not announced plans to refile for an IPO, a variety of factors could influence whether the company pursues a public offering in the future. Check back here or take a look at Forge’s upcoming IPO calendar to stay in the loop about a potential Clear Street IPO and other pending public offerings.

For now, as it remains a private company, if you want to invest in Clear Street pre-IPO if/when shares become available, create an account with Forge marketplace to access our deep marketplace of private market securities.

After you create a free account, you can potentially buy and sell private market shares in Clear Street and other startups based on availability and eligibility.

Forge aims to bring greater transparency to an otherwise opaque private market, and as a publicly traded company, it operates within a regulated environment that allows investors to explore private market access.