Gusto at $10B: the real last round, and a $14B IPO target to watch

This is a correction on our part. We briefly carried Gusto's headline valuation at $14B, sourced from what turned out to be its IPO target rather than a completed financing round. The actual last closed round is a $10B Series F that closed in October 2025, led by General Catalyst and CapitalG with T. Rowe Price participating. We've fixed the record — and the distinction between the two numbers turns out to matter for anyone holding Gusto equity.

The numbers

$10B is the valuation from Gusto's last priced, closed transaction — the number that should anchor 409A fair-value estimates and any equity math you run today. $14B is the target Gusto set for itself in the S-1 it filed with the SEC in March 2026 ahead of a planned Nasdaq listing. A target isn't a price: it reflects where bankers and the company hope shares will land, not where they have. The two numbers will converge, diverge, or land somewhere in between once the IPO actually prices.

What changed

Gusto crossed $1B in trailing 12-month revenue in early 2026, a milestone that materially strengthens its case for the higher end of an IPO range — the S-1 filing is a real, concrete step toward a listing, not just IPO-track talk. But a filing is a proposal to the market, not a market clearing price; the $14B figure won't be a fact about Gusto's value until shares actually trade at or near it.

What this means for employees

Gusto has been granting ISOs for over a decade, so a long-tenured, broad-based workforce is sitting on a wide range of strike prices and vesting states. Until the IPO prices, $10B — not $14B — is the defensible number for modeling AMT exposure on an ISO exercise: it's the last value someone outside the company actually paid. If a listing is genuinely on the near-term horizon, that's still a reasonable window to think about exercising some options while private, to start the long-term capital-gains clock — just don't anchor the AMT math to a target that hasn't priced yet.