Several prominent hedge funds are preparing to sell big stakes in a recent SPAC merger.
BridgeBio Oncology Therapeutics filed a shelf registration for the sale of up to 63 million shares of common stock. They include shares issued in a private placement in public equity in February, shares issued to the sponsor, and shares issued to certain initial shareholders of the blank-check company.
In February 2024, Helix Acquisition Corp. II raised $184 million in its initial public offering. It was a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by Cormorant Asset Management.
One year later, the SPAC agreed to merge with TheRas — doing business as BridgeBio Oncology Therapeutics — a clinical-stage biopharmaceuticals company working on a pipeline of novel small-molecule therapeutics targeting RAS and PI3Kα malignancies. The company was initially formed as a subsidiary of BridgeBio Pharma.
The merger closed in August. The deal included $261 million raised from a common stock PIPE transaction led by Cormorant. Some of the other investors were hedge funds ADAR1 Capital Management; Deerfield Management; Octagon Capital; Paradigm BioCapital Advisors; StemPoint Capital; and Surveyor Capital, a Citadel company.
Since the merger, shares of BridgeBio Oncology have traded as high as $12.08. They closed Friday at $8.94, down more than 10 percent from the SPAC’s IPO price of $10 per share.
Cormorant currently owns nearly 17.9 million shares, or 22.6 percent of the total, and Deerfield owns 6.2 percent, according to a regulatory filing made public on Friday. In the filing, Cormorant said three of its venture capital funds and its hedge fund together plan to sell nearly 10 million shares of BridgeBio, or most of their holdings.
Deerfield intends to sell all of its shares. Other hedge funds that have indicated plans to sell all or most of their shares include Citadel, Paradigm BioCapital International Fund, Paradigm BioCapital Advisors, ADAR1, and Octagon Investments Master Fund, which all participated in the PIPE.
Several hedge fund firms with small investments in BridgeBio Oncology in their VC funds, including Casdin Private Growth Equity Fund II, will also sell shares.
SPACs have staged a comeback. There have been 84 IPOs so far in 2025, which is poised to see the most new issues since the last boom year, 2021, when there were 613, according to SPAC Insider. There were just 57 in 2024 and 31 in 2023. This year’s IPOs have raised a gross $204.8 million, the most in the past four years, according to the website.
This indicates that many more blank-check companies are hunting for deals. The number of mergers is likely to rise in 2026 and 2027.
