This week in IPOs — Oura sails through as data-center deals stall
Oura's roadshow drew cornerstone buyers this week, while SB Energy delayed its IPO on valuation pushback. Same week, opposite outcomes — here's why.
Two IPOs tied to the same AI infrastructure boom hit opposite outcomes this week, and the gap between them says more about what investors will actually pay for right now than either deal does on its own.
Oura: a roadshow that found its buyers fast
Oura launched its IPO roadshow on September 21, offering 50 million shares — 13.5 million new, 36.5 million from existing holders — in a $40-to-$44 range that implies a $15.62 billion fully diluted valuation and up to $2.2 billion raised. That's up from the $11 billion mark set in its October 2025 Series E, a jump Zorro's IPO pipeline has tracked since the company's confidential filing in May. Cornerstone investors Eli Lilly and Dragoneer Investment Group have already indicated interest in roughly $400 million of the offering combined, a signal underwriters typically line up before a roadshow to de-risk the book, not after demand looks shaky. Oura is expected to price the week of September 28 and debut on the Nasdaq under ticker OURA days later.
What's backing the number is a public S-1 that showed revenue up 74% to $1.21 billion, with subscription revenue — recurring, high-margin, and tied to an installed base of over 5.5 million ring wearers — growing 121% year over year to $240.5 million over nine months. That's a business with a trading history of its own kind: hardware sold once, software billed every month after. Once an IPO like this actually lists, it moves from the pipeline into Zorro's recent IPOs tracker, where the first-day pop and subsequent price action become visible against the terms set this week.
SB Energy: the same week, a very different reception
SB Energy was on a similar track. It publicly filed an S-1 on September 1 and had planned to launch its own roadshow the week of September 21, targeting a valuation above $50 billion. Instead, bankers pushed the launch to at least mid-to-late October after premarketing turned up investor interest below that number — not no interest, but not enough of it at the price SoftBank wanted. Nvidia's commitment to the deal grew alongside the delay: on top of a $1.5 billion private placement at the IPO price, the company disclosed an additional $1.5 billion prepaid forward contract for SB Energy shares at a 10% discount to whatever that IPO price turns out to be, bringing its total stake to roughly $3 billion.
The core issue investors flagged during premarketing is one a companion piece on SB Energy's filing worked through in detail back when the S-1 first landed: the company's headline $439 billion in contracted backlog is a multi-decade, mostly-unbuilt number, with only about $1 billion of it expected to convert to revenue over the next 24 months. SB Energy has yet to bring a single data center into commercial operation. Pricing a company at $50 billion-plus on backlog alone, with execution still entirely ahead of it, is a harder sell in September 2026 than it would have been in a hungrier market a year earlier — and premarketing is exactly the stage designed to surface that gap before a company is embarrassed by an unsold book.
DayOne: pushing ahead anyway, on different footing
A third data-center name moved in the opposite direction from SB Energy this same week. DayOne Data Centers, the Singapore-based operator spun off from GDS Holdings, is proceeding with plans to file its S-1 publicly in mid-October and list as soon as November, targeting a roughly $20 billion valuation and up to $5 billion raised — undeterred by SB Energy's stumble and by a separate dispute involving Oracle and Blue Owl that has clouded a New Mexico data-center project elsewhere in the sector. The detail investors and reporters keep coming back to: DayOne already operates data centers generating revenue across Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, Finland and Spain, rather than projecting a backlog that starts converting years from now. Roughly 2.1 gigawatts of capacity bookings sit behind that, following a $4.5 billion Series C closed in June.
The pattern underneath both stories
None of this means "data-center IPOs are struggling" as a blanket read — Oura isn't a data-center company, but the mechanism that separated it from SB Energy is the same one separating DayOne from SB Energy: investors in September 2026's IPO market are pricing operating history and near-term cash conversion noticeably higher than they're pricing multi-year contracted backlog, even backlog with a name like Nvidia or OpenAI attached to it. A roadshow is, functionally, a live poll of that question before a single share trades — which is why watching what gets delayed in premarketing tells you more about investor appetite than watching what gets filed.