In 2020 and 2021, 861 special purpose acquisition companies (SPAC) with market values above $50 million were taken public in the United States. Across 2023 and 2024, the SPAC figure was 88.
Most of the market read that as a verdict. Blank-check vehicles had been oversold, the mergers had disappointed, and the structure was finished as a serious route to a listing.
Gregg Jaclin and Emmis Acquisition Corp. read the same numbers and went ahead anyway. In July 2025, they filed to take Emmis Acquisition Corp. public, and by August it had priced.
“The SPAC market goes where the IPO market doesn’t go,” says Mr. Jaclin, Managing Director at Exchange Listing LLC. “For a number of years, the IPO market was doing really, really well. In the microcap and mid-cap space, the ability for companies to complete fairly quick IPOs was happening a lot in ’22, ’23, ’24. So the SPACs dropped off. Now it’s getting harder, taking longer.”
That last clause is the thesis. Conventional listings and SPACs trade places rather than rising and falling together, and by early 2025 the conventional route had begun to close.
The Two Curves
The Renaissance Capital figures bear out the substitution. Traditional IPOs above the same $50 million threshold were cut from 681 across 2020 and 2021 to 250 across 2023 and 2024. By the middle of 2025, the year-to-date counts had converged: 53 SPAC IPOs against 86 conventional ones.
For a decade, the assumption was that a SPAC existed because a company couldn’t manage an IPO. The arithmetic now points somewhere else. Both routes were narrowed, and the one narrowed less is the one with a shorter and more predictable timeline.
Mr. Jaclin also names a cause for the earlier collapse that had nothing to do with market appetite. “There were some accounting issues with SPACs back in ’21 and ’22 that really slowed things down,” he says, though he weights the other factor higher: “I think it was more about the prevalence of the IPO market at the time.”
Who the Structure Is Actually For
The most consequential number in this market has less to do with issuance counts than with who is doing the listing.
From 2024 through the middle of 2025, foreign private issuers accounted for more than half of all US IPOs. That is a majority, and it reframes what an American exchange listing is now for.
Those companies face a specific problem. Regional exchanges across Southeast Asia offer thin liquidity, and Singapore is difficult to list on locally. A business can be profitable, growing and well capitalized, and still find that a domestic listing produces a stock nobody trades. The US market solves that. Getting into it, under Nasdaq’s tightened standards, has become slower and less certain than it was two years ago.
A SPAC merger compresses the difference. The timeline is shorter. The valuation is negotiated with a counterparty instead of being discovered in a bookbuild. And the vehicle arrives with a sponsor group that already understands the process, which for a management team navigating it from twelve time zones away is a substantial part of what’s being bought.
“Now there are so many companies looking to do SPAC mergers, targets that want to get public quicker than doing a full IPO,” Mr. Jaclin says. “That’s a great opportunity for us.”
Companies Emmis Strives to Work With
Emmis targets a specific type company, and the band sits noticeably above the population Exchange Listing serves on conventional listings.
Revenue between $50 million and $250 million. EBITDA between $10 million and $50 million. Sectors across industrial and business services, technology, and health or financial services. Business types described as emerging growth, business transformation, or roll-up. A real need for growth capital.
Set that against Mr. Jaclin’s description of the micro-cap market he usually works in, which he defines as companies “with $25 million in revenue or under.” A $50 million revenue floor with positive EBITDA in the tens of millions is a different animal. These are companies that could have gone public conventionally in a friendlier market and have decided not to wait for one.
The geographic focus is ASEAN, committed but not exclusive, with the chief executive spending months on the ground in the region during 2025. Mr. Jaclin is careful not to draw the mandate too tightly.
“Emmis definitely has an Asian focus, and as the market has changed and as NASDAQ has changed, we are still looking at and considering domestic companies as well,” Mr. Jaclin said.
How Emmis Launched in Just Ninety Days
The detail Mr. Jaclin points to when asked whether the timing was luck is how fast the team got the vehicle built.
“We got it done in record time, honestly, less than 90 days from the time we filed the initial registration,” he says, “and that’s because this is what we do for a living.”
The registration statement was filed in July 2025 and the IPO priced the following month. Emmis is a Cayman entity listed on Nasdaq, with a $100 million offering across 10 million units, I-Bankers Securities as underwriter, Sichenzia Ross Ference Carmel as counsel and TAAD LLP on the audit. It runs 15 months with two extensions available, for two years total, and carries a business combination target in the fourth quarter of 2026.
Ninety days from filing to pricing is the kind of timetable that comes from a group that has assembled the same professional team repeatedly on other people’s transactions. The auditors, counsel and underwriter were not new relationships to anyone involved.
The Part Worth Watching
SPAC sponsors have earned their reputation for structures that transfer value quietly. Emmis positions itself against that history, describing a sponsor group of operators with hands-on IPO and M&A execution experience rather than one holding a promote, and terms built for clean economics without dilution traps.
Whether that holds up will be settled by the trust structure and the eventual merger agreement rather than by anybody’s pitch. What the positioning reveals is what the sponsors believe investors are now worried about, and the answer is dilution.
The comparables offered alongside the thesis are the weakest part of the argument. Cantor Equity Partners’ merger with the bitcoin-native Twenty One, AltC’s completed combination with the nuclear developer Oklo, Screaming Eagle’s acquisition of Lionsgate Studios, and Flame Acquisition’s purchase of Sable Offshore are all large-cap outcomes with raises between $200 million and $510 million, in sectors carried by narrative momentum. A vehicle hunting ASEAN industrials with $50 million in revenue is not proposing the same trade. Those deals establish that SPAC mergers can perform, which is a lower bar than showing this one will.
Emmis & SPAC Serve Companies That Need to Move Fast
The most useful thing about Mr. Jaclin’s position on SPACs is that he doesn’t treat the structure as a solution to every situation, including for companies that could pay him to use it.
“I’d rather a company go out and raise capital privately first, whether it’s through crowdfunding, a hedge fund, PE, whatever they can do, and then maybe two or three years from now we take them public,” he says. His reasoning is partly self-interested, and he says so: “My compensation is usually restricted stock that I have to hold for a while, so I don’t want the company to make the wrong decision to go public when it shouldn’t, and not survive it.”
Emmis exists for the companies that can’t wait two or three years, and because after a 90% contraction in issuance, there is finally room to move. Less competition, fewer sponsors, and a population of foreign issuers that now makes up the majority of US listings.
“We’re excited about what Emmis has to bring,” Mr. Jaclin says.
