JD Durkin: Jeb Spencer joins me now live here on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Chairman and CEO of Southport Acquisition Corp II. Nice to see you here today.
Jeb S. Spencer: Nice to see you. Thank you so much for having me.
JD Durkin: You just priced a $200 million SPAC, I believe, right here at the New York Stock Exchange. Why is now the right time to launch?
Jeb S. Spencer: We think there is tremendous opportunity in the technology world right now, especially around AI companies. There are a tremendous number of AI companies coming out, a lot of newer ones, some older ones.
And a very interesting piece of that business is that there are many forward contracts that get done in these businesses. So you’re able to kind of look at what revenue will be like in two to three years based on these contracts. And that’s something we feel is relatively unique. And we think that our vehicle can help those companies get public more rapidly.
JD Durkin: All right. Right on. Jeb, I’m sure you and your team are taking a lot of different things into consideration you can’t quite yet reveal publicly, but give me some sense about what the ideal acquisition target actually looks like from where you’re positioned.
Jeb S. Spencer: The ideal company looks a lot like our first SPAC IPO, which was Angel Studios. So we merged with Angel Studios about a year ago. When we met Angel, they were doing about $150 million of revenue and they were morphing their business.
We found it to be a very unique business, and they were a little bit under the scale that a traditional investment bank would get behind and underwrite, so we were able to help them.
Since they’ve been public, they’ve grown almost three times over the last couple of years. And we think that’s because they became a public company and had access to all of the capital that you can get access to as a public company.
So we’re looking for another company that looks very much like Angel, that is doing that $100 million to $200 million range, that we can see a path to a billion in revenue and long growth over time.
JD Durkin: In this environment, how do you go about trying to find the right AI partner without overpaying for the AI label?
Jeb S. Spencer: I think it’s a great question. I’m a growth equity guy at heart, so I’ve done a lot of growth equity deals. And so I am friends with a lot of VCs and PE guys, and I’m hoping that I can use my influence with them as a fellow PE and VC guy to come to some agreement on valuation.
There’s always some path to valuation, I believe. That’s how I’ve seen it my whole career.
JD Durkin: Let’s just take a step back and give me some of that context. Over your long career, what is bringing investors back to the SPAC side? Because I have noticed a really noticeable uptick in SPAC listings again here in 2026.
I don’t know if we’re quite where we were in 2021, but what have you seen in terms of the overall environment that makes this a favorable play for people once again?
Jeb S. Spencer: Yeah, I think the SPAC market really died a bit between ’22 and ’24. There were very few SPAC IPOs that got done. But I think this change in the landscape, as far as new companies that were coming out and the disruption that’s occurring with many companies, just made a lot of us think, hey, there’s a great opportunity here to take some of these companies public more rapidly than they normally would be able to achieve.
The SPAC product, I think, is somewhat misunderstood, somewhat misused. When I first looked at it, many of the companies were very small companies, very little revenue, but $600 million-type market caps. To me, those look like seed companies, maybe not even VC quality.
We look at it and we see that $100 million to $200 million revenue range and the ability to get them into the public market more rapidly than they would otherwise.
JD Durkin: Jeb Spencer, Chairman and CEO of Southport Acquisition Corp II. Please come back and see us as the process continues. Really nice to see you here today.
Jeb S. Spencer: Thank you so much for having me.
JD Durkin: Take care.
