Silicon Valley is known for producing tech businesses that start in garages and turn into massive publicly traded companies ubiquitously known across the globe. From Oracle and Microsoft to Google and Facebook, the public markets are responsible for turning ambitious tech founders into billionaires.

But the appeal of the IPO is waning, according to a survey published this week from startup accelerator Techstars. Of the 1,550 entrepreneurs surveyed by Techstars, only 15% said their long-term goal is an IPO. That’s down from 16% a year earlier.

Following an extended bull market in high-growth software and internet stocks, the tech IPO market collapsed in 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, which pushed investors out of risk, slashed valuations and led many later-stage companies to delay their plans to go public. 

The prior year was a record period for new offerings, with companies including Roblox, Robinhood, Rivian and UiPath hitting the market. There have been scant few notable tech IPOs in the past two and a half years.

“In combination with the lack of confidence that IPOs will bounce back in short order, this year’s data further underlines the trend that startups are staying private for longer, and IPOs are out of favor with the vast majority of early-stage entrepreneurs,” Techstars said in its report.

For 34% of entrepreneurs surveyed, the preference is to get acquired by a publicly traded company, down from 36% last year, while 30% indicated their goal is to remain private or independent, up from 28% in the prior report.

Investment banks have been gearing up for a rebound.

Colin Stewart, the Global Head of Technology Equity Capital Markets at Morgan Stanley, told CNBC in April that “the IPO market’s back,” predicting that 10 to 15 tech companies might go public by the end of the year. Stewart cited high priced and well traded IPOs as “bod[ing] well for the future.” 

Stewart’s comments came after Reddit went public in March, becoming the first major social media company to hold an IPO since Pinterest in 2019. Astera Labs, which sells data center connectivity chips to cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure companies, went public the same week, followed by data-management company Rubrik in April.

Prior to that, there was a brief jump in activity in September, when chip designer Arm, grocery delivery company Instacart and cloud software vendor Klaviyo debuted.

However, in comparison to the pre-2022 stretch, it’s been mostly quiet for new tech companies on Wall Street. Uncertainty surrounding the presidential election in November is pointing to a dearth of deals for the remainder of the year.

“We have the upcoming election, which is not helping the market in H2,” Athena Theodorou, head of software banking in the Europe region at UBS, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “We do expect the market to remain muted in H2,” Theodorou said, though she said that in Europe the IPO market has started to show signs of life.

WATCH: IPO market is coming back in Europe

Amazon is ramping up its development of artificial intelligence technology, hiring top talent from AI agent startup Adept and licensing the company’s technology.

Rohit Prasad, a senior vice president and head scientist who oversees Amazon’s artificial general intelligence unit, wrote in a memo to employees on Friday that the company hired Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan and “a few other deeply talented team members to our AGI team.”

Luan will oversee Amazon’s “AGI Autonomy” division, and report to Prasad, he wrote in the memo, which CNBC obtained. Amazon confirmed the contents of the memo. Geekwire was first to report on it.

Amazon faces fierce competition in AI, as rivals Microsoft and Google rapidly add new features into their core products while also giving businesses more ways to access large language models in their public cloud offerings. Amazon’s cloud unit has launched a range of AI services, including its own models, which are generally viewed as lagging behind the top competitors.

Amazon has also pumped billions of dollars into OpenAI competitor Anthropic, and it’s planning to overhaul its Alexa voice assistant with a new paid version that has generative AI capabilities. Prasad, who previously served as a head scientist for Alexa, was tapped in August to steer Amazon’s development of AGI, or software that’s significantly more advanced than current AI and starts to approach human-level capabilities.

Last month, Amazon announced Adam Selipsky, the head of Amazon Web Services, would be stepping down and succeeded by Matt Garman, the head of sales at marketing at AWS.

Talent wars are heating up across the industry.

Microsoft in March hired Mustafa Suleyman, a cofounder of Google’s DeepMind who went on to lead startup Inflection AI. Microsoft also brought on several of Inflection’s top executives and is licensing some of its technology. The arrangement caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which is probing whether Microsoft structured the deal to avoid antitrust review, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Adept was founded in 2022 by a group of former OpenAI and Google engineers. The company quickly attracted the backing of Microsoft and Nvidia and was valued at more than $1 billion in early 2023.

Adept is a player in the burgeoning space of AI agents, which refers to AI tools that are equipped to complete complex tasks without human assistance. The startup was reportedly developing an agent that can perform actions on a computer on the user’s behalf, like navigating webpages and logging data.

As part of Friday’s agreement, Amazon will license Adept’s technology, multimodal models and some datasets, which “will accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows,” Prasad wrote. Amazon is using the technology under a non-exclusive license, the company said.

“David and his team’s expertise in training state-of-the-art multimodal foundational models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision to delight consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” Prasad said.

Adept confirmed the move in a blog post. The company noted that developing its own AI models would’ve required more capital, and said the Amazon deal will allow it to focus on building agents. Adept will continue to operate as a standalone company after Luan and other execs join Amazon.

WATCH: Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky to step down

SoftBank on Friday announced plans to issue euro and dollar-denominated bonds as it looks to pay down debt and focus its investments on artificial intelligence.

The huge Japanese holding company said it will issue around $900 million in U.S. dollar-denominated bonds in two tranches, and 900 million euros ($962.8 million) worth of bonds, also in two tranches. These will have interest rates ranging from 5.4% to 7% per annum.

SoftBank said the money raised will be used for “repayment of indebtedness and for general corporate purposes.”

Its shares closed up 2.5% after news of the bond issuance.

The raising of money via debt comes as SoftBank’s overall financial losses have begun to narrow as it logs some successes, including the initial public offering of chip designer Arm.

Meanwhile, the company, which runs a massive technology investment arm called the Vision Fund, has also suggested it is looking to ramp up investments in artificial intelligence companies.

In a rare public appearance this month, Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of SoftBank, talked of a concept he called artificial super intelligence, or ASI. He said this refers to AI that is 10,000 times smarter than humans, which he expects to exist within 10 years.

SoftBank is likely looking to capitalize on improving investor sentiment toward the company, highlighted by a 65% year-to-date rise in its shares.