Private equity's role in SPACs grows as market shrinks

Private equity took on a larger role in the market for special purpose acquisition companies even as the number of so-called blank-check companies contracted sharply in the wake of the 2021 SPAC boom.

More than 18% of SPACs that held an initial public offering in 2022 were backed by private equity, up 7 percentage points from 2021 and 14 percentage points from 2020, according to an S&P Global Market Intelligence analysis that tracked SPACs with at least 5% ownership by a private equity or venture capital firm. In the first five months of 2023, as some SPAC activity shifted to Asia from North America, nearly 17% of all SPAC IPOs globally were private equity-backed SPACs. READ MORE