My guess: if we count meaningful pure-play AI companies (labs, infra, vertical apps at $1B+ valuations), somewhere around 40–60 will IPO globally by mid-2029. Here’s the reasoning. The floodgates just opened. Cerebras opened 89% above its IPO price on May 14, and both OpenAI and Anthropic confirmed confidential S-1 filings in June 2026. Behind them, Databricks, Mistral, Cohere and xAI are tracking for 2026–2028 windows, plus Lambda and a long tail of vertical AI (legal, medical, coding). Morgan Stanley expects 10 to 15 major tech companies to go public in 2026 alone, mostly AI-related. Run that rate for three years with a growing pipeline and you get to 40+ without heroic assumptions. Two wildcards. One: the China side, the STAR Market and HKEX robotics/AI queue could add another 15–20 on its own if the window stays open. Two: whether the first mega-listings hold up. If the early ones pop, the window opens for the rest; a stumble resets pricing expectations across the entire pipeline. If OpenAI or Anthropic trades badly in year one, my number drops by half.