TLDR: banks take on some financial risk and offer advisement on price and inside access to capital rich accounts that would buy the shares; potentially less ris

TLDR: banks take on some financial risk and offer advisement on price and inside access to capital rich accounts that would buy the shares; potentially less risky than going out on the open market alone where if no one knows who you are or aren't advised by a bank to buy your stock, they simply won't Banks do take on the risk to buy* the shares if for some reason the public market doesn't like the listing price or the interest isn't there. Sometimes they just put forth "best effort" and their role is to give inside preference/hype up shares to their large institutional customers to buy the IPO shares. They do the "pricing" of the IPO which sets the shares at a level where there is sufficient interest to sell the public offering of shares but also don't want it to pop too much because the company loses out on raising capital. However, given the inflation in the market and general hype around a lot of these companies with good growth (and some kind of path to profitability) I don't see how the bank really does anything other than what you say...take money away from the company and the whole pay for access to investors thing doesn't matter anymore. *I don't think this is always the case, but used to be in some IPOs