347 IPOs. $44 billion raised. A 54% jump from 2024, when only 225 companies bothered going public. Deloitte, DFIN, and EY all published reports on it, and the consensus is that 2025 was the strongest year for listings since the 2021 madness (1,035 IPOs, $286 billion, most of which burned up within a year).
The difference this time is that investors had been burned and remembered it. They wanted profitability, not just growth slides. Flutter Entertainment put out full-year revenue guidance of $18.4 billion with adjusted EBITDA at $2.97 billion.
DraftKings added 3.8 million active customers in two years. Those numbers sit in the same investor universe as https://1xbet.ie/en/line/football/127733-spain-la-liga and platforms like it, where football betting volume has been climbing steadily enough to move quarterly earnings.
Venture-capital-backed IPOs averaged 450% surges post-listing. Private equity? 18%. Nobody needed a chart to read that gap. EY called the reopening "uneven" and noted investors had refocused on governance and profitability after earlier cycles left them holding worthless stock.
DFIN pointed out that Q3 alone had 97 IPOs, the most active quarter since 2021. VC-backed deals were crushing it, PE-backed deals were barely moving, and the middle ground was mostly empty.
Tech and AI-adjacent companies grabbed over 25% of all non-SPAC listings, and Nasdaq captured 81% of them ($25 billion on listing day). Medline pulled off the biggest single IPO since Rivian back in 2021, $6.26 billion in December. Opened at $29, closed at $41.
Healthcare, industrials, even insurance companies showed up with deals. Second-half momentum was strong enough that optimism for 2026 is already running high.
Flutter has been public since 2019 (NYSE), DraftKings since 2020 via SPAC. Neither went through the 2025 IPO wave. But their earnings reports kept landing on the same desks as IPO prospectuses because the growth numbers are hard to argue with when you see them side by side. Commercial gaming revenue grew 7.2% in 2025 per Morningstar, roughly three times GDP growth. Digital gaming was up 28%, projected at another 20% in 2026.
FanDuel controls about 44% of online sports betting market share. That's down from 47% in 2023 on paper, except the market itself expanded so much that the 44% represents a larger absolute number. iGaming revenue grew 44% in Q3, EBITDA hit $919 million in Q2 (up 25%).
Over 500 new slot titles were added to the platform in Q3, which helped push iGaming market share to 27%. DraftKings had 18.5% revenue growth, added 800,000 active customers in 2025, and entered 2026 with a $17.7 billion market cap and a "Strong Buy" consensus from analysts. Flutter's overall revenue growth for 2025 came in at 20% in its home market, with EBITDA growth of 82%.
La Liga fixtures, Premier League weekends, Champions League nights. All of them create betting volume spikes that land in quarterly earnings. Flutter's sportsbook was 53% of fiscal 2025 revenue. iGaming was 44%.
Kalshi downloads outpaced FanDuel and DraftKings four to one in January 2026 (Apptopia). 10% of DraftKings users showed up on Kalshi too, so this was cannibalisation. Fortune projected prediction markets would pull $630 million in Super Bowl bets, absorbing 80% of the year-over-year wagering growth for the event. Wall Street noticed. Analyst estimates for Flutter's Q4 adjusted EPS dropped 49% over three months, per Bloomberg, and revenue expectations took a 6.3% hit.
Flutter and DraftKings built their own prediction products through a CME Group joint venture. Launches got delayed into 2026. Citizens analysts kept buy ratings, figured both companies picked the cleanest regulatory route. And look, Kalshi doesn't have a sports product. Flutter and DraftKings spent a decade and billions of dollars building one. That gap doesn't close fast.
The 2026 IPO pipeline is deep (AI, defence tech, biotech). But for entertainment and betting, the story now is M&A. Flutter acquired Snai and NSX in 2025 for southern European and Asia-Pacific expansion. Smaller operators are reportedly looking for exits.
Global gambling revenue is at roughly $600 billion, heading to $1 trillion by 2033 according to multiple industry projections. Jurisdictions keep legalising digital wagering. And institutional money that spent years treating betting stocks as a niche play has shifted them into the entertainment core of their portfolios, which tells you plenty about where the smart money thinks this sector is going.
