Seattle-based investment bank Cascadia Capital is launching a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Cascadia Acquisition Corp.
The new SPAC closed a $150 million initial public offering on Monday and is trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol CCAIU.
Cascadia Capital CEO Michael Butler said the SPAC is targeting companies in artificial intelligence, and robotics and automation. He added the investment bank plans to continue launching SPACs moving forward.
"We view the SPAC as an ongoing product for Cascadia. We're not a one-and-done," Butler said. "We think the companies we partner with will pretty easily be able to delineate between us, our resources, our approach and the other SPACs out there."
SPACs, often called "blank check companies," are companies formed without a specific business other than to acquire a company and take it public. Butler said Cascadia wants to start slow and see this SPAC through before starting a new one targeting a different sector.
According to Butler, Wall Street has gorged on SPACs recently, and there will be a day of reckoning for low-quality SPACs. That doesn't mean, however, that all SPACs are bad, he said, and Cascadia is confident its 20-plus years of existence and stability will give the investment bank an edge.
"The SPACs that our clients and us were approached by were two guys that met a few months prior and were working out of a WeWork," Butler said. "Several of our clients said to us, 'Cascadia, have you thought about sponsoring a SPAC?'"
Cascadia's announcement is part of a larger SPAC trend that has hit Wall Street recently. According to the first quarter PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report, there were 281 SPAC IPOs during the first quarter of 2021, raising a total of $83 billion. In all of 2020, there were 230 SPAC IPOs that raised a total of $70.4 billion.
Cascadia was founded in 1999 and works with both private and public companies. The investment bank offers services in mergers and acquisitions, debt capital and equity placement. Butler said the market is in the midst of the "fourth industrial revolution," which Cascadia defines as the merging of the physical, digital and biological.
"It's not a five-year play; it's a 10- or 20-year play," Butler said. "We're in the early stages."
