AI, Quantum Computing Feed SPAC Revival

Special-purpose acquisition companies, which burned many investors after a boom earlier this decade, are making a comeback. Last week, Swiss quantum computing company Terra Quantum agreed to a SPAC merger valuing it at $3.25 billion. Strategic metals company Miotal agreed to a SPAC merger at a valuation of about $10 billion.

SPACs are blank-check companies created specifically to take private companies public via so-called “reverse mergers.” SPACs promise investors a chance to get in early on trendy, formerly private companies before they’ve gone through checks and balances that the Securities and Exchange Commission applies to initial public offerings.

While regulators have curbed some of the excesses of US SPACs that the market experienced a few years ago, the mechanism remains a way to bypass the traditional IPO process, which would subject these companies to additional scrutiny, and it 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,” says Dynamix CEO Andrejka Bernatova, who has raised about $630 million for SPACs.

In the first quarter of 2026, 62 SPACs went public in the United States, raising a cumulative $13.2 billion, 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.

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 in 2025, but many deals were acquisitions of early-stage startups, according to PitchBook data.

This cycle’s targets are of higher quality than those of the 2021 boom, when “everyone was chasing the next pipe dream, or chasing companies with unproven results,” explains Derek Kearns, a partner at Centri Business Consulting.

The track record for de-SPACed companies on the stock market remains questionable. Kodiak AI KDK, 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.