India’s Biggest IPO Year Is About to Be Beaten in Six Months

At a Glance:

• H2 CY26 alone is projected to deliver ~$19-22 Bn, enough to out-raise CY25’s full-year record of ~$18.5 Bn, with the full year tracking toward ~$21-24 Bn. 
• A queue of 200+ IPO-ready companies, more than 150 of them already cleared to go, sits behind the projection, anchored by NSE, Jio Platforms, and SBI AM. 
• Redseer’s IPO Readiness Index adds a second data point: ~210 new-age companies are on track to be IPO-ready over the next 24 months, a longer-horizon pipeline that reinforces the same story. 

H1 CY26 was a quiet period for the Indian IPO market, with fewer than 40 mainboard IPOs. The prevailing sentiment suggested that the market had entered a prolonged drought. In retrospect, however, the slowdown was less a sign of weakening markets and more a period of pipeline building for H2 CY26. According to Redseer Strategy Consultants, H2 CY26 is projected to deliver ~$19-22 Bn in IPO proceeds, putting the full year on track to reach ~$21-24 Bn and making CY26 a historic year for Indian IPOs. 

Infact, CY26 is also shaping up to be the biggest listing year globally, with SpaceX listing on the NASDAQ in June at a valuation of ~$1.75 Tn, the largest public debut on record. OpenAI and Anthropic have both filed confidentially for the second half, each targeting a valuation near ~$1 Tn, and together the three could raise ~$200 Bn, more than the entire US IPO market raised across the previous four years combined.  

What makes this historic rather than just large is the pattern underneath it. 

Companies entering the global top 10 by market cap directly from the IPO market have few modern precedents, and CY26 may deliver it more than once.  

India and Hong Kong are carrying the rest of the year’s heavyweight pipeline into H2. The world’s largest capital market and the fastest-compounding one are writing history by rewriting their all-time records in the same calendar year.  

“India has outperformed every other major market on primary issuance over the decade. India is third globally by main board proceeds in 2025 but first by trajectory.” 

CY25 was India’s best-ever primary market year: ~100+ mainboard IPOs raised a record $18.5 Bn. This record is a high bar for all of CY26 to reach, but the second half of CY26 can alone outraise it. The second half is projected to deliver ~$19-22 Bn on its own, out-raising last year’s full-year record from six months of listings, with the full year tracking toward ~$21-24 Bn. NSE and Jio Platforms are each expected to list among India’s ten most valuable listed companies, echoing the same leaderboard reshuffle playing out globally with SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. 

What sits behind that projection is a queue of IPO-ready companies: 190+ are lined up to list this half, with more than 140+ of them already cleared to go. 

The names carrying that H2 calendar are already public with NSE and Jio Platforms filed in the same week in June. SBI AM is the first big-ticket listing of H2, with Turtlemint already listed. Behind them sit other expected names including Manipal Hospitals and Zepto – a mix of scale and new-age businesses rather than one of the two. Diwali, which falls in the second half of CY26, carries the calendar’s largest listings. 

But if this is indeed going to be a historic year, then why was it being read as a slowdown all across the year? 

The surface-level narrative was built on fewer headline listings and a market that seemed to be slowing down, just as the year was supposed to turn historic. What the narrative missed was a market that kept building its pipeline through the slowdown, waiting for a steadier window to price into. 

A conflict between Israel and Iran pushed energy prices up and sent equity markets into retreat through H1. This led the Indian secondary markets to have their worst opening six months since CY20. A war of this kind can only push the IPO windows rather than the IPO pipelines. It shifts when issuers choose to price, not whether they file at all. Issuers held their SEBI approvals rather than withdrawing them, and those approvals kept accumulating through the same months as the listing calendar went quiet. This is why H2 now carries the weight H1 did not. 

All of this rests on three separate, verifiable facts sitting alongside each other: 

• A 24-month Readiness pipeline and a near-term H2 queue both point in the same direction. 
• Anchor issuers, NSE, Jio Platforms, and SBI AM among them, large enough to move the calendar on their own. 
• A domestic capital base deep enough to absorb the queue without waiting on foreign flows to return. 

A market carrying a pipeline like this into its quietest months is not cooling, it is loading for what comes next. 

The Next Step: 

The signal to track is the DRHP queue and not the H1 headlines. NSE and Jio Platforms have already filed their DRHP. If you monitor how quickly the calendar fills in behind them, that pace is what actually indicates where H2 is headed.