Blue-collar boom: Spending on data center construction rose 46% year-over-year, with deals concentrating in trades needed for the buildout. Learn more in our Q2 Construction & Engineering Report.

Flying high: Aerospace and defense PE just pulled off its best exit run in years. Our latest report on the sector dives into the data.

And fast: Space tech funding has already skyrocketed past 2025 levels. Read more.

For decades, the math was simple: outgrow private capital, then go public to raise more.

Yet starting in 2022, when venture activity first slowed, startups found ways to stay private longer: round sizes got bigger, and secondaries made pre-exit liquidity easier to attain.

Now, IPOs are no longer simply a capital-raising event, a change rooted in structural shifts in venture rather than a temporary side effect of the market’s sluggishness.

Underneath that choice is a pricing problem.

AI has pushed private valuations into another stratosphere, while public markets are still pricing off revenue and margins that have not kept up. Median Series D+ valuations went from $137 million in 2016 to over $2 billion through H1 2026. However, public markets are not paying these prices. For example, Chime went public at a 63.4% markdown from its private market peak.

Continued uncertainty from multiple wars, rising energy prices, and AI’s draining of moats around business models across industries has made the market too volatile to instill confidence in the next cohort of VC-backed IPO candidates.

The IPO pipeline is expected to remain thin in the coming years with a more selective cohort of IPO candidates: companies that stayed private longer, are bigger at the time of listing, and go public for a specific reason tied to their growth story. This is the new normal.

For more analysis on what this means for the future of venture and IPOs, download our analyst note IPOs Are Not Dead but Demoted.

Medicare started covering GLP-1 drugs for weight loss on July 1, at a $50 monthly copayment, under a program that runs through the end of 2027. But to get a prescription approved, the doctor must confirm the patient is following a structured diet and exercise plan.

Personalized nutrition companies sell that must-have care. Most are virtual clinics that connect patients with registered dietitians and bill health plans for the visits.

GLP-1s strip muscle along with fat, cause side effects that push patients off treatment, and most of the lost weight returns once patients stop. Dietitians manage protein intake, nutrient deficiencies and the transition off therapy. Insurers and employers already carrying the drug cost want the weight loss to last, so they pay for the counseling that helps it last.

Personalized nutrition startups raised roughly $256 million in Q2, more than in all of 2025 and close to a fifth of all foodtech VC dollars for the period.

Nourish took the largest round at $100 million on a $1.8 billion post-money valuation. It runs a network of more than 10,000 dietitians billing commercial, Medicare and Medicaid plans. Menlo Ventures led, joined by Thrive Capital, Index Ventures and JPMorgan’s growth equity arm, all healthcare investors rather than food investors.

Patients stay on GLP-1 therapy for years, and as long as they do, the dietitian bills every month, which produces recurring subscription revenue rather than one-time sales.

Expanded coverage is pulling demand forward by handing these companies millions of patients who need the service now, rather than over the next decade. What’s more, AI tools that draft clinical notes and handle patient follow-up let each dietitian carry a larger caseload, so revenue grows faster than headcount and margins behave like software.

These factors all give the subsegment the clearest path to outsized returns. Read more about the sector as a whole in our H1 2026 Foodtech Report, and explore the shifting GLP-1 landscape in our recent analyst note After the GLP-1 Gold Rush: Analyzing Private Capital Opportunity in Obesity.