I run a SPAC and have seen both its failures and its second act up close.
The structure of a special purpose acquisition company was never the problem. It was the people running it — and this time, the people are different.
On April 30, General Catalyst and RRE Ventures sponsored SPACs on the same day, raising a combined $652 million. Three quantum-computing companies — Infleqtion, Pasqal, and Xanadu — have either de-SPACed or announced de-SPAC transactions at multibillion-dollar valuations in the past four months. Five years after the excesses of the 2020–21 cycle severely damaged the SPAC market’s reputation, some of its more disciplined firms are re-engaging with the structure, and one emerging deep-tech vertical is increasingly embracing it as a viable path to the public markets.
The temptation is to read this as a vindication, but that would be a mistake. The failures of the “SPAC mania” era were plentiful, and the equity wreckage was real. But the diagnosis that hardened into received wisdom — that the SPAC structure was the problem — was always too convenient. The SPAC vehicle was never the primary problem. The sponsors were. The bankers were. And so was a market that paid more for a narrative than for underwriting discipline. The proof is in the very numbers often cited to bury SPACs — once the numbers are properly compared.
Start with the failure cases that anchored the backlash. Nikola, which peaked at a $27.6 billion market cap after going public via a SPAC, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 2025, years after its founder, Trevor Milton, was convicted of fraud in 2022 and sentenced to four years in prison.
Lordstown Motors, which reached a roughly $5 billion market cap after going public, produced only a limited number of trucks before filing for Chapter 11 in June 2023. Lucid Motors, which became a listed company using a SPAC, is still trading, but its shares are down more than 80 percent since their post-merger high. WeWork, which went public via a SPAC at a roughly $9.4 billion valuation, filed for Chapter 11 in late 2023. The common thread in those deals was not the SPAC vehicle. It was a combination of unseasoned sponsors, forward-looking statements that the SEC was not then in a position to penalize, and a brief market window in which capital chased narrative without underwriting unit economics.
In a traditional IPO, the projections that filled 2020–21 SPAC decks would have been impossible to publish: IPOs enjoy no liability safe harbor for forecasts, and underwriters facing lawsuits tend to keep their published forecasts realistic. SPACs effectively slipped the leash: sponsors often believed the safe harbor covered them and built promotional valuations on revenue ramps that assumed flawless execution and bottomless de-SPAC capital. Both assumptions were fiction. But that gap is now narrower. The SEC’s January 2024 rulemaking, effective last July, sent a message that any forecasts must be founded on defensible assumptions. Much of the behavior that defined the 2020-21 cycle is now more tightly constrained.
The 2026 cohort is different in the way that matters most. But here is what nearly every SPAC obituary gets wrong: the headline performance numbers are meaningless unless you filter for the capital a deal actually raised.
A billion-dollar IPO will often raise $100 to $250 million from buyers willing to write real checks — with discipline priced in at the listing, though the exact amount can vary widely by deal. A SPAC that raises a fraction of that is closer to a direct listing, and grading the two on the same curve is the category error behind many of the most damning SPAC statistics. Filter for the capital a deal actually raised from non-affiliated investors, and the picture changes materially.
An analysis of 93 de-SPAC transactions closing in the 24 months ended May 2026 found a stark bifurcation: deals that raised at least $100 million in straight equity PIPE or cash retained in trust posted a median return of +17.2 percent, while undercapitalized deals — where redemptions averaged 99 percent of trust — returned a median of -90.3 percent. (Data from SPAC Insider.) This compares with an average return of 27 percent for traditional IPOs over the same period, according to Renaissance Capital, though the two groups are not directly comparable, given differences in company maturity and other factors. The $100 million threshold is not a predictor of outperformance. It is the line between survival and near-total wipeout: below it, fewer than one in twenty de-SPACs generated a positive return.
Quantum computing illustrates where the SPAC structure has arguably served a valuable purpose in financing frontier technology— precisely because these deals have, in recent cases, met the higher bar for capital and sponsorship discipline that separated winners from failures earlier in the cycle. Quantum is capital-intensive, narrative-dependent, and requires capital raising flexibility that the traditional IPO process is poorly equipped to underwrite. A one-week roadshow is a poor fit for companies whose value depends on technical milestones five to ten years out. The SPAC process accommodates more complex storytelling. That is not pixie dust. It is a structural fit for a particular type of company, not a universal solution, and it does not automatically extend to other sectors.
What the General Catalyst and RRE transactions also highlight is one of the enduring advantages of venture-backed SPAC sponsorship: differentiated deal flow. Venture firms often have earlier access to emerging categories, founder relationships, and technical diligence that can create a meaningful sourcing edge.
But one of the clearest lessons from both the prior cycle and the current market is that sourcing alone is not enough. Successfully executing a SPAC transaction requires experienced sponsors who can navigate SEC scrutiny, execute capital markets transactions, position investors, and transition to public-company operations. Many firms during the 2020–21 cycle underestimated the specialization and dedicated infrastructure required to execute that process effectively.
What the new VC-sponsored SPACs signal is not that SPACs universally work. It is that the most disciplined investors in the market now treat the structure as a serious tool — in the right hands, paired with sector expertise and real public-market execution. The market that produced 613 SPAC IPOs in 2021 has produced roughly 97 year-to-date in 2026, according to SPAC Insider, with sponsor concentration in serial dealmakers rather than first-time issuers. The failure-rate math in a market of roughly 240 disciplined sponsors competing for targets is fundamentally different from a market of 700 chasing a backlog that did not exist.
There is no SPAC pixie dust, and there never was. The market believed in it once, and the correction was brutal. But the lesson of that correction was never “avoid the structure.” It was “respect it.” Bring real capital, experienced sponsors, and a company that can survive contact with the public markets, and a SPAC does exactly what it was built to do. The firms re-engaging now have learned that.
The lesson isn’t to avoid SPACs. It’s to demand the kind of capital, sponsorship, and discipline that make them work.
Dan Nash is CEO of Silicon Valley Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company.
