Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick is the latest to set up a special-purpose acquisition company that is trying to raise up to $ 287.5 million in an initial public offering.
According to a Securities and Exchange Commission case, Kaepernick – the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who knelt during the national anthem to protest systemic racism and has not played in the NFL since 2016 – is co-sponsor and co-sponsor president of Mission Advancement Corp., which works in partnership with The Najafi Cos., A privately held firm.
Mission Advancement will focus on racial justice and diversity issues and aims to acquire a consumer business worth about $ 1 billion.
“The mission of the Najafi / Kaepernick partnership is to identify, acquire and advance a company in order to create significant financial and societal value,” the dossier said. “We believe that Mr Kaepernick’s substantial business experience, combined with his long-term leadership in justice and racial equity, will support our success in identifying a potential target company and adding transformative value to the combined entity.
The filing mentioned that Kaepernick worked with global brands such as Nike NKE,
Disney DIS,
Netflix NFLX,
Apple AAPL
Beats de Dre, Medium, Electronic Arts EA,
AMZN from Amazon
Audible, and Ben & Jerry’s in recent years.
As an indication of its mission, the company’s board of directors is 100% black, indigenous and black and is predominantly female. Managers include Google marketing executive Attica Jaques, former Apple executive Omar Johnson and Birchbox co-founder and CEO Katia Beauchamp.
SPACs are companies with incomplete verification that have exploded in popularity in recent years. In essence, these are bare-shell companies looking for a company to buy and trade on, in a faster process than a traditional IPO. So far this year, there have been 131 SPACs that have raised a collective of $ 39.9 billion, according to SPAC Research. It is already about half the number of SPACs as of 2020.
23andMe Inc. said last week it would go public with a merger with a SPAC owned by Richard Branson, and hedge fund Elliott Management is considering creating a SPAC.
Billionaire investor Sam Zell said on Tuesday that SPAC’s madness reminds him of the late 1990s. “This is again rampant speculation, just like the dot-com boom,” he told CNBC in an interview.
Although he said SPACs can be very effective, Zell said he worries that many are built on unstable financial foundations.