Dealogic: July 2022 was the first month in five years that no new SPACs raised money, after SPAC IPOs peaked in March 2021 with over $36B raised
Welcome, Sandbox friends. — Today's Daily discusses … Tweets: @wsjgraphics : SPAC activity reached the lowest level in five years in July https://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ @amyssorrells : SPAC activity plummets after boom of 2020, dealing financial blows to many and the clock ticking for some. ⬇️ https://www.wsj.com/... @acemaxx : #SPACs were one of the hottest investments on Wall Street early last year, booming alongside #cryptocurrencies , #meme #stocks and other speculative trades - Now much of the air is out of the bubble, chart @WSJecon https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/... Hussein Kanji / @hkanji : Shares of companies that went public via SPAC have tanked https://www.wsj.com/... Tren Griffin / @trengriffin : One of these months is most not like the other. https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The SPAC pipeline has fully closed. After more than 66 SPACs were raised in 2020, double the 2019 count, issuance peaked in March 2021 with over $36 billion raised — and Dealogic's data shows July 2022 was the first month in five years with no new SPAC IPOs at all.
The collapse traces directly to how the class of 2020–21 performed: most VC-backed startups that went public via SPAC in 2021 saw their stocks drop, with Metromile, View, Owlet, and Clover Health among the worst, and by early 2022 nearly half of sub-$10M-revenue SPAC debutants had missed their earnings or revenue targets. With post-deal returns this poor, new sponsors had nothing left to sell.
First-order effects
- Sponsors and underwriters who built businesses around SPAC issuance lose their deal flow entirely — the product that peaked at $36B in a single month generated zero new raises in July.
- Private companies that treated SPACs as a ready IPO alternative lose that exit route just as the 2020-era pitch — an alternative in a year of uncertainty — no longer holds.
Second-order effects
- Existing de-SPAC companies face a harder path: with no fresh issuance validating the structure, the ones already trading below their targets must justify themselves on fundamentals rather than sponsor momentum.
- Investment banks and advisory shops that staffed up for the boom shift back toward traditional IPO and M&A pipelines, repricing SPAC-related services.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the SPAC wave proves to be a one-cycle phenomenon tied to speculative conditions — leaving a lasting population of public micro-cap companies whose performance will shape whether regulators and institutional investors ever re-embrace the structure.
The trend: Speculative public-market vehicles like SPACs are cycling from record issuance to zero as post-deal performance destroys the sponsor pitch, echoing the same boom-bust arc as crypto and meme stocks.