After a spectacular rise and fall from 2020 to 2023, special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) are experiencing a bit of a renaissance.

SPAC IPOs raised more than $11.8 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, the strongest quarterly showing since the 2021 peak.¹ SPACs accounted for the majority of U.S. IPO deal volume during the period, and roughly 250 of them are currently in the market hunting for targets, backed by tens of billions of dollars sitting in trust, according to Forbes.

A good recent example is Agility. The humanoid robotics company announced a definitive agreement on June 24, 2026 to merge with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a SPAC sponsored by Churchill Capital, in a deal valuing Agility at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value. Coverage focused not just on the price tag but on the profile of the target: a company with existing commercial deployments and named enterprise customers, rather than a pre-revenue concept. That distinction says a lot about how the market has changed. The SPAC structure looks familiar, but the rules of the road, and the communications discipline required to close a deal, are not the same as they were during the 2020-2021 boom.

Why SPACs are coming back

The resurgence isn't nostalgia for the blank-check gold rush. It reflects a specific set of market conditions.

Traditional IPO markets have reopened unevenly, rewarding scale and penalizing mid-market companies that don't fit the profile institutional investors want for a straight IPO. At the same time, private equity portfolios are aging past expected hold periods, and sponsors are under real pressure to return capital to limited partners. For a company with a demonstrated business model and a credible growth story, a negotiated SPAC merger can offer speed and pricing certainty that a conventional roadshow cannot.

The targets look different, too. Today's viable SPAC candidates tend to be revenue-generating businesses with operating discipline, not the pre-revenue, projection-heavy companies that dominated 2021. Sector concentration has shifted toward capital-intensive, technically complex industries, including advanced manufacturing, space, robotics, energy infrastructure and AI, where a traditional IPO timeline is harder to underwrite. Agility's pitch to investors leaned heavily on this point: it billed itself as the only U.S. publicly listed pure-play humanoid robotics company with proven, active commercial deployments, rather than a story built on a future product roadmap alone.

This isn't the 2021 SPAC market

The single biggest change since the pandemic-era boom is regulatory. In January 2024, the SEC adopted final rules that meaningfully tighten the SPAC and de-SPAC process.

Three changes matter most for how companies talk about a deal.

1) The SEC removed the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act safe harbor for forward-looking statements in SPAC and de-SPAC filings. Projections that once carried substantial legal protection now carry real exposure, which is a major reason sponsors and targets have become far more conservative about the numbers they put in front of investors.

2) Target companies are now co-registrants on the de-SPAC registration statement, exposing the target and its officers and directors to liability for misstatements in a way that didn't exist before. The de-SPAC process now functions much more like a traditional IPO from a disclosure and diligence standpoint.

3) Any projections that are used must be accompanied by disclosure of the material assumptions behind them, presented alongside historical results with equal prominence. Aspirational hockey-stick projections, unsupported by a documented basis, are effectively off the table.

The net effect: a market that treats the SPAC less as a shortcut and more as an efficient, credible vehicle to access public markets, provided the company brings public-company-grade discipline to its numbers and its narrative from day one.

Why communications matters most during the de-SPAC period

The de-SPAC period, the months between announcing a business combination and closing it, is where deals are won or lost, and it's where communications carries outsized weight. The reason comes down to redemptions.

Public shareholders in a SPAC have the right to redeem their shares for a pro rata share of the trust rather than roll into the combined company. High redemption rates have become the norm rather than the exception, and they can materially shrink the cash available at closing, often forcing sponsors to lean on PIPE financing or backstop arrangements to get the deal done. In this environment, investor confidence in the underlying business, not just the mechanics of the transaction, drives whether shareholders stay in or cash out.

That makes the communications workstream during this period a direct input into deal viability, not a supporting function. A few things matter in particular.

1) Consistency across every document and every spokesperson. With the target now liable as a co-registrant, there's no room for the media Q&A, the investor deck and the proxy statement to tell even slightly different versions of the story.

2) Conservative, well-supported claims. Given the loss of PSLRA safe harbor protection, every projection or forward-looking statement needs a clear, defensible basis, and communications materials need to reflect the same caution as the filings.

3) A clear, credible growth narrative that gives long-term holders a reason to stay past the redemption date, rather than a narrative built to generate a pop on day one.

4) Proactive, consistent engagement with retail and institutional holders throughout the solicitation period, since silence tends to get filled by redemption, not conviction.

What the redemption data actually shows

It's tempting to assume the SEC's 2024 rules fixed the redemption problem. The data says otherwise, and the real story is a better one for communications and investor relations teams to tell.

The rules became effective in mid-2024. Redemption rates didn't immediately move, according to data from the IPO Initiative at the University of Florida. Quarterly averages tracked by SPAC Research stayed above 92% through all of 2024 and into most of 2025, even touching 98% in the third quarter of 2024, more than a year after the new disclosure and liability regime took hold. The real shift didn't show up until the second half of 2025, when average redemptions dropped to roughly 79% in the third quarter and 68% in the fourth. That's still high by pre-2021 standards, but it marks a genuine inflection point, and it arrived about 18 months after the regulatory change.

That lag matters. It suggests the rules changed disclosure and liability exposure immediately but didn't move investor behavior on their own. What tracks more closely with the actual decline is the return of experienced, repeat sponsors, a reopened PIPE market and buyers self-selecting into deals with committed financing already in place. Securities lawyers are genuinely split on how much credit the SEC deserves: some argue the rules have done little for investors, while others see them as leveling the playing field between de-SPACs and traditional IPOs over time.

The aggregate numbers also hide some substantial dispersion. Individual deals with credible sponsors and demonstrable financial fundamentals have closed with redemption rates under 40%, and a few even at 0%, while the market average stays north of 90%. That spread is the more useful data point for a team considering a SPAC than the headline average, because it shows redemption isn't a fixed feature of the current market. It's a variable that responds to sponsor credibility, financing certainty and the strength of the narrative shareholders are given.

That's the real lesson here: how a company handles the story during the de-SPAC period is a genuine determinant of whether shareholders redeem or stay in, not an afterthought to the mechanics of the deal.

The bottom line

For now, SPACs are back in fashion, though on much tighter terms than the last time around. Instead, the version that is working in 2026 rewards the same things that make any public company communications program effective: discipline, consistency and a narrative that can withstand scrutiny. The companies getting this right are treating the de-SPAC period less like a marketing campaign and more like the opening chapter of life as a public company.

¹ US Capital Markets Watch, PwC, https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/deals/us-capital-markets-watch.html