PRE-IPO MARKETS ARE WEIRD RIGHT NOW

So I was looking at pre-IPO markets the other day (as one does), and I noticed something interesting. Everyone's talking about how IPO windows are "closed" and growth equity is "dead," but meanwhile there are 25 genuinely compelling private companies sitting there with reasonable valuations, actual revenue, and fund managers who return our calls. It's like the market decided to have a sale on quality companies but forgot to send out the memo.

The twist? We capped our universe at $10 billion valuations. Not because we hate money, but because $50 billion late-stage deals have become the financial equivalent of buying a house in San Francisco — technically possible, but you're mostly paying for the privilege of telling people you did it. These sub-$10B companies still have room to grow without requiring the entire GDP of Denmark to justify their next funding round.

Here's what we found: 25 companies worth a combined $108 billion, with direct paths to 90% of them through people we actually know. (Networking, it turns out, still beats spreadsheet analysis.) More importantly, these companies fall into five investment themes that tell us something useful about where markets are heading. Think of this as Money Stuff, but for private companies that might go public before you finish reading this.

Everyone thinks enterprise AI is about robots taking over the office. Wrong. It's about making the 47 different databases your company uses actually talk to each other for once. Case in point: Glean (valued at $425M), which was founded by ex-Google search engineers who looked at how enterprises handle internal knowledge and basically said, "This is insane."

Then there's H1 Insights ($1.8B), which has built the world's largest database of healthcare professionals and what they're actually doing. This isn't "AI will cure cancer" nonsense — it's "pharmaceutical companies spend $200 billion on drug development and maybe they should know which doctors are prescribing what." Theory Ventures led their growth round, which makes sense because Tomasz Tunguz understands that the best AI investments aren't about artificial general intelligence, they're about making very specific, very expensive human workflows slightly less painful.

Even Verkada ($4.2B) fits here, though they'd probably hate being called an AI company. They make security cameras, but the interesting part isn't the cameras — it's that their AI can actually tell the difference between a delivery truck and a security threat. (Most security systems cannot.) Meritech Capital owns a big chunk, and Meritech doesn't do speculative AI plays. They do profitable enterprise software that customers actually pay for.

Here's a fun statistic: there are now 31.1 million software developers in the world, up from 21 million in 2018. That's a lot of people who need tools, and unlike most professionals, developers actually buy the tools they need instead of using whatever IT purchased five years ago. This creates something beautiful: a market where good products win based on merit instead of politics.

Postman ($5.6B) figured this out early. They built an API testing platform that 25 million developers use because APIs have become the nervous system of modern software. Every time you check your phone and see data from twelve different services, that's APIs working. When they break, someone needs to fix them fast. Postman is like the Swiss Army knife for API debugging, except it actually works and developers love using it.

Battery Ventures has been quietly building a portfolio of these companies. Retool ($3.2B) lets developers build internal tools without wanting to quit their jobs. Linear ($2.75B) makes project management actually work for engineering teams (a harder problem than it sounds). Webflow ($4B) lets designers build websites without learning to code, which sounds simple until you try to do it.

Healthcare technology has a terrible reputation, and deservedly so. Most "health tech" companies are just websites that charge patients $200 to talk to a nurse practitioner about their rash. But there's a subset of healthcare companies that are solving real, expensive problems for the people who actually pay the bills: hospitals and insurance companies.

Cedar ($3.2B) took one look at healthcare billing and said, "What if this wasn't actively hostile to patients?" They built a patient payment platform that turns incomprehensible medical bills into something resembling normal e-commerce. Hospitals love it because they actually collect more money. Patients love it because they can understand what they're paying for. (The fact that this is revolutionary says everything about healthcare.)

Then there's Clipboard Health ($900M), which is basically Uber for nurses, except instead of getting you home from the bar, it keeps hospitals staffed during a nursing shortage. The company connects over 1 million healthcare workers to facilities that need them, with AI-powered matching that actually works. Centana Growth Partners led their growth round, and Centana only does healthcare deals, so they know the difference between real solutions and healthcare theater.

The first wave of fintech was about unbundling banks and making everything an app. The second wave is about solving problems that traditional financial institutions genuinely can't solve, either because of regulation or because their technology was built when fax machines were cutting-edge.

Ripple ($3B) is the poster child for this. Instead of trying to replace money with magic internet tokens, they built a network that makes cross-border payments actually work. Over 300 financial institutions use RippleNet because moving money between countries using traditional correspondent banking is still basically medieval. Banks wire money through 3-4 intermediaries, each taking a cut and adding a delay, and somehow this was considered acceptable until someone built a better way.

Gemini ($7.1B) took a different approach. While other crypto exchanges were racing to list every token that someone invented in their garage, Gemini focused on being the crypto exchange that compliance officers could actually approve. This turns out to be a good business model when institutional investors want crypto exposure but also want to keep their jobs.

Let's talk about the unsexy stuff. While everyone else is chasing AI and crypto and rockets to Mars, there's a collection of B2B software companies that are quietly printing money by solving mundane problems that enterprises actually have. These companies don't get written about in TechCrunch, which is exactly why they're interesting.

ActiveCampaign ($3B) serves 185,000 customers across 170 countries with email marketing automation that doesn't suck. Silversmith Capital led their growth round because Silversmith understands that while HubSpot gets all the attention in the marketing automation space, there are millions of small and medium businesses that can't afford HubSpot's enterprise pricing but need something better than MailChimp.

Gearset (estimated $500M) is even more niche: they do DevOps for Salesforce. If you're thinking "that sounds incredibly specific," you're right. It's also incredibly profitable. Every large company uses Salesforce, and every Salesforce deployment eventually becomes a mess of custom objects and workflows that someone needs to manage. Gearset built the tools to make that manageable, and Salesforce customers pay real money for tools that prevent their CRM from collapsing under its own complexity.