SoftBank Vision Fund is hopping on 2020’s hottest trend: the special purpose acquisition company.
On Monday, SoftBank Vision Fund head Rajeev Misra revealed that the mega-fund, after a rocky 2019, is preparing to debut a SPAC in the next two weeks or so, allowing public investors to bet on SoftBank’s money managers and their chops.
While Misra was scant on the details of the SPAC itself, including how much the blank check company was seeking to raise, he did openly state his thinking on raising one.
“Why take money from us when you can get better valuations from the public market, with no strings attached?” Misra said at the Milken Institute Global Conference.
Public markets have been on a tear recently, erasing many losses suffered in the early days of the pandemic as low-bond yields have investors chomping at the bit for returns. Perhaps best capturing the sentiment is a tweet from banker Carl Chiou, joking about Twilio’s $3.2 billion acquisition by Segment: “Damnit, I could have SPAC-ed them for at least $6 billion.”
SoftBank is no stranger to the SPAC trend. SoftBank-backed private equity shop Fortress filed for two IPOs that have raised $300 million each this year, while Vision Fund portfolio company Opendoor is slated to go public via merger with Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital Hedosophia II in a $4.8 billion deal.
SPEAKING OF ROBUST PUBLIC MARKETS: Hardest hit in the first half of the year, exit activity among venture capital-backed startups jumped to $103.9 billion across 185 companies in the third quarter, according to a PitchBook/NVCA analysis. The numbers represent a rise of about 292.5% and 7.6% respectively compared to the previous quarter—which means bigger exits by deal size in general. The surge was led by the multibillion IPOs of companies such as Snowflake, Palantir, Asana and Unity. Read more.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
