Near, a data intelligence company that claims to have 1.6B anonymized user profiles, raises $100M as it goes public via a SPAC merger at a ~$1B valuation
The IPO window has all but closed for technology companies in the wake of a massive downturn in the market, but an opening still remains for some, in the form of SPACs.
Context & Ripple Effects
Near has been raising on the same pitch for years: its $100M Series C in 2019 funded an AI platform that merges online and offline behavior into anonymized user profiles, and by this round the company claims 1.6B of them. What changed by May 2022 is the exit route — with the traditional tech IPO window effectively shut, Near goes public through a SPAC merger instead.
That puts Near in a specific cohort: Nerdy took the same SPAC path at a $1.7B valuation in early 2021, and 23andMe listed via a Richard Branson SPAC at $3.5B months later. Near's ~$1B landing spot is well below those marks, a sign of how far sponsor appetite had cooled. The arc since confirms the fragility — Near Intelligence filed for bankruptcy in late 2023 with plans to sell itself.
First-order effects
- Near converts private backing into $100M of raised capital and a public listing at roughly $1B, giving Great Pacific Capital and earlier investors a liquidity path the frozen IPO market would not have offered.
Second-order effects
- Other late-stage data and consumer-tech companies weighing an exit see the SPAC remain open precisely when conventional IPOs do not, though Near's sub-$3.5B valuation relative to 23andMe signals sponsors are pricing these deals far more conservatively than in 2021.
Third-order effects
- Near's eventual bankruptcy filing and planned sale suggest the deeper pattern: SPACs functioned as a last-resort liquidity valve for companies that could not clear a traditional IPO bar, and listings without durable economics ended in distressed outcomes rather than sustained public-market runs.
The trend: As the traditional IPO window closed, SPAC mergers became the fallback exit for venture-backed data and consumer-tech firms — often at compressed valuations and with survival odds the 2021 cohort did not price in.