Life-science IPOs may be hitting the wall
- so far this year, seven biotech and medical-device startups have
yanked their offerings - but one part of the IPO market is booming.
That’s the field of “special-purpose acquisition corporations,”? or
SPACs, which are essentially blank-check companies that raise money
through initial offerings specifically for the purpose of acquiring
other companies.At Renaissance Capital’s IPOhome news page (partial screenshot here,
as the flow of news will probably throw off the numbers), fully
one-third of the IPO-related items involve SPACs filing, pricing or
completing IPOs. Throwing things into an even starker light is the fact
that most of the other items - 11 out of 27, to be exact - are all
about IPO withdrawals or postponements.SPACs can buy any target they can afford, but some have shown
interest in private companies. In fact, a few have already been active
in the life-sciences venture sector, and odds are good they won’t be
the last. In December, a SPAC took out Precision Therapeutics, a maker of cancer diagnostics that looked shaky to me when it first filed for an IPO. Then just last week, a different SPAC bought up specialty pharma Dynogen Pharmaceuticals.
Source: Venture Beat
0 Responses to “Venture Beat: Brace yourselves for the SPAC attack”