The special objective acquisition business set up by Team Nine Media declared pricing of its first community giving of 20 million units at $10 apiece, for total gross proceeds of $200 million.
Discovery-backed Team 9, whose digital-media brands involve Thrillist, NowThis, the Dodo and Seeker, filed paperwork for the SPAC previous month indicating it designs to incorporate with “another focus on business” in the electronic-media room. Group Nine has not publicly determined any M&A targets. A SPAC is a kind of blank examine keeping enterprise fashioned for the intent of boosting money by means of an IPO for an acquisition, merger or other company mix.
Group Nine Acquisition Corp.’s securities will start off buying and selling Jan. 15 on the Nasdaq Funds Marketplace less than the ticker image “GNACU.” Every unit comprises a single share of Course A frequent inventory (which will trade beneath the symbol “GNAC”) and just one-third of a redeemable warrant each individual whole warrant (buying and selling underneath the image “GNACW”) permits the holder purchase 1 share of GNAC Class A typical stock at an exercise price of $11.50 per share.
Of the $200 million gross proceeds from the IPO, Team Nine Acquisition Corp. stated it would receive a net $189 million soon after underwriting bargains and commissions. Team Nine reported it is targeting the acquisition or merger with businesses in electronic media or related areas like social media, e-commerce, situations, and digital publishing and marketing and advertising.
GNAC is led by CEO and director Ben Lerer (pictured higher than), who also serves as the CEO of Team 9 Media. Brian Sugar, president of Team Nine Media and previous CEO of PopSugar, is president and a director of GNAC, and Team Nine Media CFO Sean Macnew serves as main fiscal officer of the SPAC.
Subsequent the IPO, the Group 9 SPAC will possess a 19.8% fairness stake in the corporation, which the firm stated is made up “solely of founder shares” held by Lerer, Sugar and Macnew.
In addition, GNAC introduced two additions to its board of directors: Richard D. Parsons, co-founder and spouse of Creativeness Capital and a director of Lazard Ltd and Lazard Group, as perfectly as the previous CEO of Time Warner and former chairman of Citigroup and Jen Wong, COO of Reddit and former president of electronic at Time Inc. Parsons and Wong have been granted 25,000 units each and every of GNAC.
SPACs have become a trendy way for non-public businesses to elevate financing and go general public, devoid of acquiring to go by means of the additional time-consuming conventional IPO route. Providers that have long gone community via SPACs a short while ago consist of DraftKings, Open up Lending and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space-tourism venture.
New York-primarily based Team 9 Media was shaped in 2016 with a $100 million investment decision from Discovery, combining three startups backed by enterprise-cash business Lerer Hippeau — Thrillist, NowThis Media and the Dodo — with Seeker (formerly Discovery Digital Networks). The business obtained comedy studio JASH in 2017 and final calendar year acquired women’s life style brand name PopSugar.
Discovery owns 25% of Team 9 (as of Sept. 30, 2020), with that stake valued at $276 million, for each Discovery’s 10-Q for the 3rd quarter. Other fairness stakeholders such as German publishing agency Axel Springer and Lerer Hippeau (the venture funds firm co-established by Ken Lerer, the father of Ben Lerer).
Barclays and Code Advisors are acting as underwriters for the Group Nine Acquisition Corp. IPO. GNAC has granted the underwriters a 45-day option to obtain up to an additional 3 million units to deal with more than-allotments. The featuring is envisioned to near on Jan. 20, 2021, topic to customary closing circumstances.