Methodology

We track companies through the filings they make with their home securities regulator, refreshed every hour. Four regulators are covered:

• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC EDGAR): S-1 and F-1 registration statements filed by U.S. and foreign companies preparing to list in the United States, plus the Rule 424(b) final prospectus filed once a deal prices.
• European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA): the EU-wide register of approved securities prospectuses, covering every market in the EU and EEA. We record the prospectus approval date.
• UK Financial Conduct Authority (National Storage Mechanism): the FCA's official archive of regulated announcements. We record intention-to-float announcements for the London Main Market and AIM, and AIM's Schedule One pre-admission notices. We record the announcement date; a company that had already been publishing annual or half-year reports before its announcement is treated as already listed, not as an IPO.
• Japan Financial Services Agency (EDINET): securities-registration filings made at the time of a new public offering (form 024000 and its amendments). We record the filing date.

A regulator filing tells us a company has registered or been approved to go public. It does not, by itself, say the deal has priced or name the day trading starts — regulators publish filing and approval dates, not listing dates.

For U.S. companies we don't guess a listing date — SEC registration statements simply don't include one. Instead we watch for the company's final prospectus (SEC Rule 424(b)(4)), which is filed once the deal has actually priced and does carry a real date, straight from the source document. That date can be off by up to one business day from when trading actually opens, since pricing and the first trading session don't always fall on the same day. Every listing shows a link to the original filing it came from, so you can always check it yourself.

Outside the US, the regulators we track publish when a company filed its prospectus or when it was approved — not the day it will list. Where a specific listing date has been reported by a wire service, an established financial-news outlet, or the company itself, we may show that date, labelled “per news reports” and linked to the article it came from. We only publish such a date after re-fetching that article and confirming it names both the company and the date — never a vague “expected Q4,” never a guess. A news-sourced date is always replaced automatically the moment an official one appears, and it never overrides a date a regulator has published.

Not every company that files a registration statement is actually going public for the first time. We leave three kinds of listings out of our IPO tracker:

• Companies that already trade publicly and are simply registering to sell more shares — this isn't an IPO, so we don't show it as one.
• SPACs — shell companies that raise money with no business of their own, formed to later merge with a private company. We track operating businesses going public, not these.
• Funds and trusts — these are investment vehicles, not operating companies.

If a company's status changes — for example, it turns out to already be trading — we update our records automatically, so this list stays accurate without anyone having to fix it by hand.

Some company overviews on this site are written with the help of AI, and we always tell you which kind you're looking at:

• Filing summaries: when a company has filed an actual prospectus with the SEC, AI reads that document and summarizes it — the business, how it makes money, its strengths, its risks, and what it plans to do with the money it raises. Nothing is added that isn't in the filing.
• Researched overviews: for companies whose regulator filing is only a short registration record — an ESMA approval entry or an EDINET form — with no full prospectus to summarize, AI researches the company from public sources instead. If it can't find anything reliable, we simply don't show an overview — we'd rather show nothing than guess.
• Sector classification: when a company's sector can't be determined from an official industry classification code, AI reads the company's own overview and picks the closest match from our fixed list of sectors — it never invents a new one. If nothing fits confidently, the sector is left blank rather than guessed.

Every overview is checked before it goes live — figures that look implausible or text that looks broken get caught and corrected, not published as-is. And every company page tells you exactly where its overview came from: a regulator filing or AI research.

This is about individual company overviews specifically. For how our published digest and report articles are written — a separate process, also AI-assisted, also never inventing a figure — see our editorial policy.

The Global IPO Filing Tracker publishes one report per calendar month, generated automatically once the month closes. A company counts as a "new filer" in whichever month its earliest tracked filing falls, even if it later amends that filing — so it's never counted twice. Its market is the exchange it's listing on when that's known, or otherwise the regulator the filing was found through. Deal size is the sum of offer amounts across filings that actually disclosed one; filings that haven't disclosed a size yet are counted separately, never left out of the total. Each report is a frozen snapshot at the time it's published — later corrections or amendments show up in future reports, not by silently rewriting an old one, so a citation made against a report keeps matching it. Coverage starts with August 2026; DiscoverIPO began tracking filings on 2026-07-31, so earlier months can't be reported completely.

We don't show market capitalization for companies that haven't listed yet — it doesn't really exist before a company sets its final share price, so instead we show the price range and offer size, which are genuinely published ahead of time. We also don't show a founding year, since none of our sources publish one reliably enough to trust. And we only show deal terms — price, shares, underwriters — once a company has actually disclosed them; many companies file to go public months before any of that is set.