If the overall pace of SPAC listings has cooled off markedly in recent weeks and months as compared to the torrid pace observed last year, some “upsizing” of recent debuts may offer at least some glimmer of hope to champions of that merger/listing model.
The most recent reading of the SPAC/IPO Tracker, as compiled by PYMNTS, shows that planned listings continued through this past week, and cumulative tallies in the banking and payment sectors stood at 41 and 22, respectively.
And drilling down into the listings, Portage FinTech Acquisition, a blank-check company that has said it will focus on the FinTech sector, said it raised $240 million this week in an upsized offering that offered four million more units than had been originally anticipated.
Elsewhere, VTEX, which offers enterprise software that helps customers build online stores in Latin America, raised $361 million in its own public offering, and was up 32 percent in its debut on the NYSE. Amit Shah, chief strategy officer and U.S. general manager at VTEX, told PYMNTS last year that the pandemic fueled 200 percent growth for VTEX’s direct-to-consumer (D2C) business with retailers and brands.
This week, too, human capital management (HCM) software provider Paycor HCM raised $425.5 million in an initial public offering. “The importance of people management has been elevated from a payroll-centric cost center to a highly strategic function focused on talent management as a critical component of business competitiveness,” Paycor said in its SEC filing tied to the listing.
And late last week, digital lending platform Blend Labs, Inc. raised $360 million for the digital lending firm, valuing it at $4 billion. PYMNTS spoke with Blend’s Head of Finance Marc Greenberg earlier this year, soon after the company announced it had acquired property title and insurance settlement company Title365. As reported, the addition of title insurance and settlement services will allow Blend to automate functions that would have been done manually using pens and paper.
Waiting On Robinhood
Looking ahead to the coming week, all eyes may be on Robinhood Markets, which is reportedly eyeing its listing to take place at the end of the month. The company is targeting a $2.2 billion debut by offering 55 million shares at a range of between $38 to $42.
In PYMNTS’ deep dive into Robinhood’s SEC filing, as of March 31, 2021, the company said there were 18 million net cumulative funded accounts on the Robinhood platform, up 151 percent from last year. The company said that from January 2015 through the end of March 2021, for more than half of those customers, the Robinhood offering represented their first brokerage account. The filing notes, too, that half of all new retail accounts in the U.S. were opened on Robinhood.
Robinhood said that 80 percent of the new accounts opened through 2020 and in the first quarter of this year came from the Robinhood Referral program, in which the company credits referring and referred customers with a stock reward (of one share each per referral), “with the potential value of each share ranging from $2.50 to $225.”
As noted in the filing: “This virality of Robinhood has continued — and even accelerated — since other major brokerages adopted our commission-free model beginning in October 2019.”
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