Just this week, at least two more companies in hot sectors like quantum computing, energy and AI infrastructure chose to ink mergers with SPACs to go public while investor enthusiasm for those sectors is high.
While regulators have curbed some of the excesses of US SPACs that the market experienced a few years ago, the mechanism remains an apt way to bypass a traditional IPO process that would subject these companies to additional scrutiny, and provides a quicker timeline for becoming public.
“The biggest advantage of a SPAC is you can hit the market when there’s appetite for that company and that industry—which may evaporate quicker than you think in this volatile environment,” said Andrejka Bernatova, CEO of Dynamix Corp, who has raised about $630 million for SPACs.
In Q1 2026, 62 SPACs went public in the US, raising a cumulative $13.2 billion in proceeds, according to SPAC Research data. In that same period, 41 SPACs filed to go public, 17 announced merger transactions, and 10 closed deals—all in line with 2025’s pace. Swiss quantum computing company Terra Quantum agreed to a SPAC merger valuing it at $3.25 billion this week, as did strategic metals company Miotal, at a valuation of about $10 billion.
With the IPO market still sluggish and M&A constrained, SPACs have become one of the few reliable paths to public-market liquidity, according to Kyle Stanford, PitchBook’s director of US venture capital research. In 2025, 48 VC-backed companies went public via IPO—the highest since 2021’s peak, but also only about a quarter of that year’s total. M&A of US startups generated $140.7 billion across 1,029 transactions last year, but many deals were acquisitions of early-stage startups, according to PitchBook data.
This cycle’s targets are higher quality than the 2021 boom, when “everyone was chasing the next pipe dream, or chasing companies with unproven results,” said Derek Kearns, a partner at Centri Business Consulting.
With that said, the track record for de-SPACed companies on the stock market remains questionable. Kodiak AI, for example, which went public via SPAC at a $2.5 billion valuation last September, now trades at a market cap of roughly $1.4 billion. Several high-profile VC-backed companies that went public via SPAC during the pandemic boom have since filed for bankruptcy, including WeWork, Nikola and 23andMe.
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