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Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. Happy Saturday everyone. Despite it being a short week I feel pretty run over from the sheer news volume that we’ve put up with in the last few days. So let’s pause, repine and talk about SPACs as a nice little treat. No, we’re not going through a SPAC investor presentation teardown today. Though we will dig into the Babylon Health SPAC on Monday. Instead, we’re discussing the SoFi and BarkBox blank-check deals. Both began to trade this week after announcing their public debuts some time ago. And things went just fine? Here’s CNBC on SoFi’s first minutes as a public company:SoFi, short for Social Finance, went public by merging with Social Capital Hedosophia Corp V, a blank-check company run by venture capital investor Chamath Palihapitiya. The stock closed up more than 12% to $22.65.That’s not only a win for SoFi, but also for the somewhat-embattled Chamath Palihapitiya, whose SPAC bets have lost some luster in recent months; of course all SPAC-led debuts are speculative, but some retail traders appeared to index more on Palihapitiya’s reputation than fundamentals — what can you do! BarkBox also did perfectly ok when it began to trade this week after its own SPAC combination was consummated, as Barrons reported:
BARK stock (ticker: BARK) jumped about 7.5% on Wednesday, to trade at around $12 in the afternoon. That gives the company a market value of close to $2.4 billion.BarkBox stock has since given up some of its gains, but managed to get public without falling below its initial SPAC price. That’s a win given how market conditions have shifted since its flotation was initially announced. Two wins in a single week is good news for SPAC-land and the myriad players on the blank-check and startup sides of the marketplace. Naturally two solid results does not a trend make, but it seems clear that for companies with material revenues the SPAC-route is not as potholed as we might have expected.