It’s no secret that special purpose acquisition companies (SPAC) have become all the craze nowadays. And we know that the fintech space is on fire.
So it comes as no surprise that a blank check company called Lazard Fintech Acquisition I, formed by financial services company Lazard, is targeting the fintech sector and has filed with the SEC looking to raise up to $250 million in an IPO, Renaissance Capital reported.
The New York-based SPAC is headed up by Alexander Stern, who serves as the president of Lazard. Lazard provides investment banking, asset management and other financial services. The company predominantly work with institutional clients.
The SEC filing shows that the company is looking for “high growth private companies,” and Goldman Sachs is the only bookrunner on the transaction.
The company in the filing said that it believes “growth-oriented subsectors of the fintech industry present particularly attractive investment opportunities, though we will not be limited to a particular industry or geographic region in our identification and acquisition of a target company.”
Renaissance Capital also reported that Lazard has some other SPACs underneath its belt, including Lazard Healthcare Acquisition I, which filed concurrently with Lazard Fintech Acquisition I. It also closed an IPO with Lazard Growth Acquisition Corp. I in February.
But the Fintech SPAC news doesn’t stop there. Steve McLaughlin, the CEO and founder of FT Partners, teamed up with Gene Yoon, the founder of Bregal Sagemount, to form a SPAC that’s looking for fintech companies in the $2 billion to $10 billion range, Finextra reported.
The SPAC is called the Independence Holdings Corp and is trading on the Nasdaq with a market capitalization of $598 million as of Monday afternoon. The S-1 for this SPAC filed with the SEC in early March.
The company said in the filing that “although our team will focus on a business combination within the FinTech, software and tech-enabled services sectors, we may consummate a transaction with a business in any industry.”
FT Partners is a fintech-focused investment banking firm, the SEC filing reads, while Bregal Sagemount is a giant private equity company.
In other recent fintech news, online trading platform eToro has reached an agreement with Betsy Cohen’s SPAC, FinTech Acquisition Corp. V, to take the company public in a deal valuing the business at $10.4 billion, according to Bloomberg.