The IPO capital you can raise is a function of your revenue prospectus.

If you have NNN million users, and you have full location tracking, purchase history, device ID, contacts, search history, list of other apps installed, usage data, Wifi SSIDs, Bluetooth beacons, etc. etc. etc. that's going to look like a huge payday compared to those same users running a mobile adblocker.

And if you're not currently collecting location tracking data, and you've got half a decade of meteoric growth, well, turn it on. Forecast that graph up and to the right, and just flip the switch to the "get money" position.

Due to the winner's curse, you only have to convince a few investors. Even if a significant fraction don't trust your prospectus and imagine that some users might be turned off by a post-IPO monetization scheme, you merely have to convince a small group that your numbers are accurate and you're TikTok 2.0.

The key point in that is that many IPO buyers are willing to believe in imaginary revenue that will never be extracted. Extracting revenue as a goal in and of itself uses a different playbook than IPOing.

Yeah, IPO (or VC) capital at this point is a Pavlov's dog trained to expect riches from every additional bit of private information in the data feed.