Analysis
A wave of 2026's most capital-intensive hardware and infrastructure companies are reaching public markets through SPAC mergers rather than traditional IPOs, a route that trades some of the marketing runway and pricing control of a full S-1 roadshow for meaningfully faster execution.
Agility Robotics is going public via a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI at a roughly $2.5 billion valuation, becoming the first pure-play humanoid-robotics company to trade publicly. Securitize took the same route through Cantor Equity Partners II, raising roughly $400 million and using its NYSE debut to tokenize its own shares on day one. Cargo-drone maker Elroy Air announced a merger with Columbus Circle Capital Corp II at close to a $1 billion enterprise value, backed by more than $165 million in committed PIPE financing, while IQM Quantum Computers separately completed its own SPAC merger to become Europe's first publicly traded quantum computing company.
The common thread across all four is capital intensity paired with a narrative that benefits from speed: hardware, quantum computing and infrastructure companies typically need capital faster than a traditional IPO's multi-month roadshow allows, and a SPAC merger can close in a fraction of that timeline once terms are agreed.
“Securitize took the same route through Cantor Equity Partners II, raising roughly $400 million and using its NYSE debut to tokenize its own shares on day one.”
The risk is well documented from the 2021-2022 SPAC boom-and-bust cycle: post-merger performance across that cohort was decidedly mixed, with many de-SPACed companies trading well below their merger-implied valuations within a year. This cycle's SPAC targets differ in one respect -- most, like Agility and Securitize, arrive with real revenue or assets under management rather than the pure growth-narrative bets that characterized much of the 2021 wave.
For growth and infrastructure investors, the SPAC comeback is a useful gauge of how much capital-intensive, pre-scale companies value speed to public markets over the additional scrutiny and price discovery a traditional IPO process provides.
What to watch: how Agility Robotics and Elroy Air trade once their respective mergers close, whether their post-merger performance breaks from the 2021-2022 cohort's pattern, and whether more hardware or infrastructure companies choose the SPAC route over a traditional S-1 in the second half of 2026.
