There’s no stopping the SPAC, which emerged from obscurity to seemingly take over finance in 2020.
Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, went from a back-of-the-shelf financial vehicle to one of the biggest segments of initial public offerings, with a record $78 billion raised in the U.S. this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That exceeded the combined total of SPACs in all previous years and made up about 45% of this year’s record $177 billion IPO volume, the data show.