Jamie Dimon used his annual shareholder letter to call out private equity for its lack of public exits this year.
“With stock markets at all-time highs in recent months, it is a little surprising that private equity firms, which own close to 13,000 companies, have not taken greater advantage of healthy markets to take their companies public,” the JPMorgan Chase chief executive wrote.
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He noted that holding periods have stretched to roughly seven years, “virtually double what it used to be.” And he also commented on the proliferation of continuation funds with some derision.
Though he was talking his book, the general message was that sponsors should take the exit before the exit disappears.
“We have generally had nothing but a bull market since the great financial crisis — it’s hard to imagine what will happen if and when we have an extended bear market,” he wrote.
In 2025, global sponsor-backed offerings rose 36 percent over the prior year, but off such a depressed base that the increase barely registered. The year did include a couple of notable listings: Hellman & Friedman’s $4.2 billion offering of Sweden’s Verisure and the $7.2 billion Medline IPO led by Blackstone, Carlyle, and Hellman & Friedman. The latter, closing out the year, was supposed to signal building momentum for 2026.
In February, Goldman Sachs strategists projected total IPO proceeds would reach $160 billion in 2026 — more than three times the roughly $48 billion raised by companies the prior year, excluding SPACs. The team expected deal count to nearly double to 120 listings.
Those projections now look optimistic, thanks in part to the ‘SaaSpocalypse’ and rising geopolitical tensions.
The software pullback, in particular, has been an unfortunate trend for sponsors given their broad exposure to the sector. Between 2020 and the first half of 2025, roughly a fifth of all buyouts in North America were tech deals, according to Bain & Co.
The S&P North American technology software index’s enterprise value as a multiple of forward EBITDA has now fallen more than 30 percent since 2021. For a company to simply keep its valuation static against that compression, it would need average annual EBITDA growth of nearly 15 percent.
Unsurprisingly, that’s led to a slowdown in public markets software exits.
At the end of March, Hg announced it would delay the €19 billion IPO of software group Visma until 2027, which had been expected to be London’s largest this year. Blackstone also delayed a planned offering for advertising technology company Liftoff Mobile.
So, while Dimon may yet see more capital markets business from sponsors this year, he’ll probably have to do without much activity from one of private equity’s most active sectors of the last decade.