2026 Watch List: The Candidates, the Wildcard, and the IPO Market’s Tunnel Vision

The 2025 initial public offering market was defined by a stark divergence: a welcome comeback year for new listings that instantly created clear winners and losers. While investors rewarded companies with an artificial intelligence or cryptocurrency narrative, stocks of consumer facing companies and software firms that couldn’t articulate an AI-driven growth story languished. .

We asked Deep Research to analyze this market split, identifying the biggest underperformers among 2025’s IPOs and detailing the high-profile candidates to watch for in the 2026 pipeline. Here is the response.