If 21st-century markets were an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, this news might have cued Gomer Pyle’s trademark line, “Surprise, surprise, surprise.” The biggest IPO of 2025 has no connection to artificial intelligence, semiconductors or data centers. It’s for a company that makes hospital gowns.
On Wednesday, shares of medical supply company Medline jumped 40% in their Nasdaq debut, closing at $40 a pop after being priced at $29 in an IPO valued at $6.3 billion.
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The IPO market had already experienced a welcome rebound thanks to successful debuts such as crypto-trading platform Circle, fintech firm Klarna and cloud-computing company CoreWeave, and Medline’s triumph may be merely an appetizer for a 2026 IPO menu potentially packed with blockbusters from mega-private firms like OpenAI, SpaceX and Databricks.
While the uptick is likely being enjoyed by Wall Street’s investment bankers, it may be even better news for private equity, which is desperate for IPO momentum:
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Back in 2021, Blackstone, Carlyle Group and Hellman & Friedman sealed a $34 billion deal to acquire a majority stake in Medline in what was one of the largest leveraged buyouts in history. According to a source who spoke with the Financial Times, the trio would have roughly doubled their combined $17 billion equity stake in the company if shares had priced at just the midpoint of their marketed range; none of them planned to sell their stock as part of the IPO.
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Through December 3, this year had delivered just 137 private equity-backed IPOs, according to PitchBook data seen earlier this month by Bloomberg, among the fewest for any year since 2010. The slow flow may pick up next year, though, with major private equity-backed IPOs already penciled in, such as the Blackstone-owned industrials firm Copeland, the Hg Capital-backed software firm Visma and KKR-backed Indian wireless carrier Jio Platforms.
Penny For Your Thoughts: For now, the market seems to be enjoying a company whose success is predicated on rock-solid fundamentals rather than sky-high aspirations (for more evidence, just look at Wall Street’s recent rotation out of the AI trade). “This is a very different profile than the typical growth IPO — Medline is profitable, cash-generative and well understood, which resonates in the current market,” Jeff Zell, senior research analyst at IPO Boutique, told Reuters on Wednesday. When speaking to Reuters, Medline CEO Jim Boyle (no relation to this author) put it more succinctly: “We make things that cost pennies, not thousands of dollars.”
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