Morgan Stanley sees 70% of top 100 unicorns in its IPO pipeline

Morgan Stanley just posted a quarter that would make most banks quietly jealous. Revenue hit $21.3 billion, up 27% year-over-year, with diluted EPS climbing 58%. But the real story isn’t the quarter itself. It’s what the bank is building underneath it.

CFO Sharon Yeshaya used the Q2 2026 earnings call to outline something more structural: Morgan Stanley manages equity plans for roughly 70% of the top 100 unicorns by market capitalization. In English, that means the bank has an existing relationship with seven out of every ten of the world’s most valuable private companies before they ever ring a stock exchange bell.

The playbook: IPOs as a door, not the destination

The strategy, as Yeshaya framed it, treats investment banking as the opening handshake. The real prize is converting those corporate relationships into recurring wealth management revenue, the kind that compounds quarter after quarter without needing another headline deal.

The headline deal this quarter was SpaceX. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs co-led the IPO in June 2026 as joint lead underwriters, with Goldman securing the coveted “lead left” position. Morgan Stanley’s Michael Grimes, the firm’s legendary tech banker, played a significant role despite the billing order. But SpaceX is just the most visible example of a much broader pipeline.

EquityZen, the private-share trading platform that Morgan Stanley acquired in January 2026, forecasts at least 12 high-profile unicorns will debut this year. That acquisition gave Morgan Stanley direct access to pre-IPO share trading, essentially letting the bank participate in value creation before the public listing even happens.

Where crypto enters the picture

That EquityZen pipeline reportedly includes blockchain and crypto-native unicorns such as Kraken and Consensys. Neither company has confirmed IPO timing publicly. Kraken, one of the oldest US-based crypto exchanges, has been rumored to be exploring public markets for years. Consensys, the Ethereum-focused software company behind MetaMask, represents infrastructure rather than trading exposure.

Morgan Stanley’s crypto adjacency isn’t new. The bank was an investor in ZeroHash, a crypto infrastructure firm that hit a $1 billion valuation in 2025, alongside SoFi.

Notably, there was zero mention of specific crypto tokens during the earnings call or related discussions about the unicorn pipeline. Morgan Stanley is positioning itself to profit from the corporatization of crypto — the exchanges, the wallets, the infrastructure — without taking directional bets on token prices.

What this means for investors

For crypto-focused investors, the potential public debuts of firms like Kraken and Consensys would create new publicly traded proxies for digital asset exposure. Right now, investors who want equity exposure to crypto infrastructure are largely limited to Coinbase, a handful of Bitcoin miners, and MicroStrategy’s leveraged Bitcoin bet. A Kraken IPO would meaningfully expand that menu.

Morgan Stanley’s 70% coverage of top unicorns also creates an interesting competitive dynamic. Goldman Sachs may have won the lead left on SpaceX, but Morgan Stanley’s equity plan relationships give it a structural advantage in converting IPO clients into long-term wealth management accounts.

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