Private Market Update October 2026

With SpaceX now public and Anthropic having confidentially filed for an IPO and being pre-IPO marketing¹, attention is turning to the private market’s next breakout company. Just below the trillion-dollar tier sit companies such as Databricks, Stripe and Revolut, and the question for investors is how much upside may remain before an exit. One threshold drawing increasing attention is the $20 billion mark. Since early August 2026, five companies have raised capital at valuations of $20 billion or more, compared with eight in all of 2025.² As companies stay private longer and keep attracting capital, a natural question follows: how well have valuations held up once companies have crossed that line?

According to Forge Data, the historical record is encouraging. Of the 40 companies Forge tracks that have reached a valuation of at least $20 billion, 28, or 70%, held that level in their latest funding round or exited at a higher valuation. For most of these companies, crossing $20 billion marked a milestone rather than a peak.

The companies that have reached this level since 2025 span several fast-moving markets. The full group appears in the table below: five examples illustrate both the opportunities and the risks in this tier.

Forge Data as of 10/14/2026

Kalshi

Kalshi operates a regulated prediction-market exchange where users trade contracts tied to real-world outcomes, from elections and economic data to sports. Unlike a traditional sportsbook, the company is a designated contract market regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The platform has scaled rapidly, with sports now a major source of trading activity and annualized revenue reportedly reaching roughly $4 billion by August 2026.³

The investment case rests on prediction markets becoming a significant category of financial exchange rather than a niche product. Greater liquidity could set off the flywheel common to exchanges: more participants make for more active markets, which in turn attract more users and distribution partners. Regulation remains the central uncertainty. State challenges to sports contracts, and the unsettled question of federal vs state authority, could affect an increasingly important part of the business.⁴ Competition from Polymarket and potentially from established financial or gaming platforms also bears watching. Still, rapid volume growth and its status as a regulated exchange give Kalshi a distinctive position at the intersection of financial markets, consumer trading and sports.

Crusoe

Crusoe Energy Systems has evolved from using stranded energy to power computing into a vertically integrated AI infrastructure company spanning energy, data center development and GPU cloud services. The company develops large-scale AI data centers and sell computing capacity through Crusoe Cloud. It has sharpened its focus on AI, exiting its bitcoin-mining operations, and reported over $100 million in contracted annual recurring revenue (ARR) for Crusoe Managed Inference in September 2026.⁵

Crusoe is positioned around one of AI’s less visible constraints: the power and physical infrastructure required to support growing compute demand. Combining energy sourcing, data center construction and cloud infrastructure gives the company exposure to several layers of the buildout rather than a single product. Large projects such as its Abilene campus show that it can execute at scale. That breadth comes with substantial capital requirements and construction risk, and demand ultimately depends on sustained AI infrastructure spending. If compute demand continues to expand, however, access to power and speed of deployment could become meaningful competitive advantages.

Reflection AI

Reflection AI is building frontier AI models and autonomous agents, emphasizing open-weight systems that enterprises can deploy and adapt. Founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, the company first focused on software engineering through Asimov, an agent designed to understand large codebases and technical knowledge around them. Its broader ambition is to offer an open alternative to closed models such as Anthropic and OpenAI across coding, reasoning and agentic workloads.

The investment case is ultimately a bet that open models will claim an important part in the AI ecosystem alongside proprietary ones. Enterprises and governments may value the control and customization that open systems can provide, which could give Reflection AI a differentiated position. However, developing frontier models requires substantial computing and research investment, and the company faces competition from some of the best-capitalized technology companies and AI labs. Its long-term position will depend on turning technical talent and an open-model strategy into differentiated products and durable commercial adoption.

Devoted Health

Devoted Health is a technology-driven Medicare Advantage insurer. The company pairs health insurance with an integrated care model, including care navigation and its own healthcare services, aiming to improve the member experience while managing medical costs. It had grown to more than 538,000 members by September 2026.⁶

The company’s vertically integrated model could better align insurance economics with patient care in the large Medicare Advantage market. Strong membership growth indicates that the offering is gaining traction, but scale alone will not determine the outcome. The model remains operationally complex and exposed to medical-cost trends, reimbursement changes and regulation. After a $25 billion valuation in its October 2026 financing, continued growth and improving margins will be needed to justify that price.

Whatnot

Whatnot is a live-shopping marketplace that combines e-commerce with entertainment and community. Initially strongest in collectibles, the platform has expanded into fashion, beauty, electronics and other categories. It generated more than $8 billion of gross merchandise volume (GMV) in the first half of 2026, more than all of 2025, and was adding 650,000 users a week as of August 2026.⁷

The investment question is whether live shopping is a durable consumer habit or simply another marketplace format. Live selling can make shopping more interactive while giving sellers a direct way to build audiences, and the company’s expansion beyond collectibles suggests the format can travel across categories. The challenge is to preserve engagement while broadening the marketplace and developing attractive economics amid competition from TikTok Shop, eBay and Fanatics. Buyer growth shows momentum, but the durability of that behavior and the path to profitability remain central to the thesis.

A milestone, not a destination

A $20 billion valuation can look like a late entry point, but the historical record suggests it often isn’t the top. Companies at this level are pursuing large markets, but their higher starting valuations leave room for missteps. For investors, the task then is to identify which businesses have the growth, competitive position and market runway to make that valuation a waypoint rather than a destination.

September gains mask uneven private market performance

September produced positive returns across Forge’s private market indexes. The Forge Private Market Index (FPMI) rose 1.4%, while the Forge Accuidity Private Market Index (FAPMI), which includes public stock exposure, gained 3.4%. By comparison, QQQ gained 3.3% and SPY declined 0.3%.

Cap-weighted FAPMI bests equal-weighted FPMI for September

FAPMI’s stronger return reflected the effects of cap weighting and a different constituent mix from the equal-weighted FPMI. OpenAI (+32.3%) was its largest contributor as the company was reportedly raising additional capital ahead of a potential IPO in 2027.⁸ Anduril, up 7.3%, also supported the benchmark. Among FAPMI's publicly traded constituents, SpaceX (+5.0%) advanced while Cerebras (-3.6%) declined, partly offsetting each other.

The divergence between FAPMI and the equal-weighted FPMI demonstrates how index construction can shape reported performance in a selective market. Several large constituents generated substantial gains, but the advance across the broader private company cohort was more modest.

Private company returns rise, but unevenly

FPMI’s positive return included several substantial advances. Fin, formerly Intercom (+78.7%), was the largest gain, followed by Lambda (+40.8%), Cresta (+29.2%) and Lyten (+26.1%). Fin rose sharply as Salesforce acquired the company for $3.6 billion on September 10.^9,10

Those gains were partially offset by substantial declines. Airtable (-56.1%) and Postman (-33.7%) recorded the steepest declines, while Kraken (-19.1%) and SambaNova Systems (-12.4%) also weighed on the index. Airtable's decline reflected its acquisition by Bending Spoons at a lower-than-anticipated price of $1.28 billion.¹¹ The coexistence of those losses with September's strongest gains explains why a positive FPMI result should not be read as a broad-based rise across the private market.

Forge Data as of 09/30/2026

Seller participation increased as buy-side IOI share reached a two-year low

Buy-side indications of interest (IOIs) accounted for 43.5% of total new and updated IOIs on the Forge Marketplace in September, down from 45% in August and 48% in July. The decline marks the fourth consecutive monthly decrease in buy-side share and the third straight month below 50%, bringing buyer participation to its lowest level in roughly two years.

The reversal follows a sustained period of strong buyer engagement through 2024, 2025 and the first half of 2026, with buy-side IOIs reaching 71.4% in May before declining over the subsequent four months. The shift points to a more balanced marketplace as sell-side participation has increased, although buyer activity remains above the levels reached during parts of the 2022 market downturn.

The recent change in marketplace composition suggests that liquidity supply has increased relative to buyer demand, reinforcing a more selective environment for secondary transactions. The trend bears watching as a potential indicator of how the balance between shareholder liquidity needs and investor demand is evolving across the private market.

Secondary pricing softened, particularly at the upper end

The median secondary market trade on the Forge marketplace transacted at a 9% discount to the last primary funding round in September, compared with a 3% discount in August. Pricing also moderated at the upper end of the distribution, with the 90th percentile falling from a 58% premium in August to a 15% premium in September, while the 75th percentile declined from an 11% premium to 6%.

Conditions were more positive below the median. The 25th percentile remained at a 30% discount, while the 10th percentile improved from an 87% discount in August to a 51% discount in September. The month-over-month changes, particularly at the tails of the distribution, can be influenced by shifts in the mix of companies transacting in a given month rather than a uniform repricing across the market.

Despite September's moderation, the distribution continues to show a highly differentiated secondary market. Select companies are transacting above their last primary funding-round valuations, while others continue to trade at substantial discounts. The wide spread between the upper and lower percentiles reinforces the importance of company-specific demand, financing vintage and the relevance of the last primary round when evaluating secondary market pricing.