Why More Growth Companies Are Looking Beyond the Traditional IPO
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Enhanced Games at Resorts World Las Vegas. PHOTO: FACEBOOK@ENHANCEDGAMES
Enhanced Games reached the public markets in less than six months.
In an era where traditional IPOs can take more than a year to complete, the speed of the company’s merger with A Paradise Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: APAD) stands out, particularly given the significantly tighter regulatory scrutiny surrounding SPAC transactions since 2021.
The transaction highlights why some growth-stage companies are evaluating special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) as a viable alternative to the traditional IPO process.
Led by Dr. Aron D’Souza and backed by investors including Peter Thiel and Christian Angermayer, Enhanced Games announced its Business Combination Agreement with APAD in November 2025. The transaction closed in May 2026, bringing the company to the public markets materially faster than the timeline typically associated with a conventional IPO.
For decades, the traditional IPO has been considered the default route for private companies entering the public markets. But for many high-growth businesses today, the process has become increasingly slow, expensive, and difficult to execute efficiently.
A conventional IPO can take well over a year to prepare, involving extensive audits, regulatory reviews, underwriter coordination, investor roadshows, and careful timing against market conditions. During that period, companies remain exposed to volatility, shifting investor sentiment, and delayed access to capital. According to EY, many companies postponed planned IPOs amid market volatility and uncertainty surrounding U.S. tariff announcements, highlighting how sensitive IPO execution can be to broader market conditions.
For businesses operating in fast-moving industries, timing matters. Delayed access to liquidity can slow expansion, hiring, acquisitions, partnerships, and product development at critical stages of growth.
That is one reason why the merger between Enhanced Games and APAD is notable. The SPAC structure allowed Enhanced Games to negotiate valuation, governance terms, and financing arrangements early in the process, compressing many of the steps normally associated with a conventional IPO into a single transaction.
Enhanced Games operates across sports, media, performance science, and wellness, sectors that require significant upfront investment and rapid execution. Earlier access to public capital provided the company with liquidity, visibility, and strategic flexibility at an important stage of growth.
The public listing also gives the company tradable equity that can potentially support acquisitions, partnerships, athlete compensation structures, sponsorship arrangements, and future fundraising initiatives. These capabilities are particularly relevant in industries evolving as rapidly as sports entertainment, wellness, and human-performance science, where speed itself can become a competitive advantage.
The deal also highlights one of the SPAC market’s core advantages: the ability to combine capital raising and public-market entry within a single process.
Beyond speed, the SPAC structure offered Enhanced Games another major advantage: earlier visibility into valuation.
In a traditional IPO, pricing is largely determined near the end of the process through institutional book-building and investor demand during the roadshow phase. Even late-stage IPO candidates can face valuation cuts, downsized offerings, or postponed listings if market conditions weaken.
Recent IPO markets have repeatedly demonstrated this risk. Instacart went public in 2023 at an approximate US$9.9 billion valuation, which is dramatically below the US$39 billion private valuation it achieved during the 2021 market peak. Similarly, WeWork’s failed IPO attempt became one of the clearest examples of how rapidly investor sentiment can shift during the IPO process.
SPAC mergers operate differently.
Enhanced Games secured an implied enterprise valuation of approximately US$1.2 billion months before closing the transaction. While the merger still required SEC review and shareholder approval, the company gained significantly greater visibility into deal economics much earlier in the process.
That certainty is particularly valuable for growth companies whose valuations are tied more closely to long-term platform potential than near-term profitability.
Rather than relying entirely on shifting IPO market sentiment, the SPAC structure allowed Enhanced Games to negotiate around its broader growth strategy and future expansion plans from the outset.
The Enhanced Games transaction also reinforces why some growth-stage companies evaluate SPACs as an alternative to the traditional IPO process.
Traditional IPO investors often prefer businesses with long operating histories, stable earnings, and predictable growth profiles. Many expansion-stage companies simply do not fit that model yet, even if their long-term opportunities are substantial.
SPACs offer a different pathway.
Instead of waiting years to achieve the operational maturity typically expected in a conventional IPO, companies can access public-market capital earlier while still in growth mode.
For Enhanced Games, early access to the public markets provides more than capital. Public equity can support acquisitions, partnerships, athlete compensation structures, sponsorship arrangements, and future fundraising efforts. These capabilities are particularly important in sectors evolving as rapidly as sports entertainment, wellness, and human-performance science, where speed itself can become a competitive advantage.
The transaction also highlights how the SPAC market has evolved since the speculative boom of 2020 and 2021.
Today’s de-SPAC environment operates under significantly tighter regulatory scrutiny, including enhanced disclosure requirements, greater SEC oversight, and stricter treatment of projections and liability standards.
The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance noted that redemption rates spiked in 2022, in some cases approaching 100%, contributing to a significant slowdown of the SPAC activity.
In response to rising investor concerns and regulatory pressure, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission adopted enhanced SPAC disclosure and liability rules in 2024 designed to align de-SPAC transactions more closely with traditional IPO standards. Sponsors also faced greater pressure to demonstrate financing certainty, stronger disclosures, and more credible post-merger execution.
Enhanced Games completed its transaction within this more disciplined environment.
Its Form S-4 included audited financial statements, governance disclosures, transaction details, and extensive risk-factor analysis subject to SEC review. The company also supplemented SPAC trust proceeds with a separately arranged US$40 million PIPE financing commitment designed to strengthen liquidity and improve deal certainty.
That structure reflects a more institutional and disciplined SPAC market than the speculative wave seen several years ago.
The Enhanced Games transaction demonstrates that, despite tighter regulation and a far more selective market environment, SPACs can offer certain growth companies a practical alternative to the traditional IPO.
For businesses prioritising speed, capital access, and execution certainty, a well-structured de-SPAC transaction may provide a more efficient route to the public markets, particularly when supported by credible financing, disciplined structuring, and strong investor backing.
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A breakdown of the mission aiming to turn space into the next layer of digital infrastructure.
Updated
January 8, 2026 6:32 PM
The Hubble Space Telescope, one of the fist space infrastructures. PHOTO: UNSPLASH
PowerBank Corporation and Smartlink AI, the company behind Orbit AI, are preparing to send a very different kind of satellite into space. Their upcoming mission, scheduled for December 2025, aims to test what they call the world’s first “Orbital Cloud” — a system that moves parts of today’s digital infrastructure off the ground and into orbit. While satellites already handle GPS, TV signals and weather data, this project tries to do something bigger: turn space itself into a platform for computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and secure blockchain-based digital transactions. In essence, it marks the beginning of space-based cloud computing.
To understand why this matters, it is helpful to examine the limitations of our current systems. As AI tools grow more advanced, they require massive data centers that consume enormous amounts of electricity, especially for cooling. These facilities depend on national power grids, face regulatory constraints and are concentrated in just a few regions. Meanwhile, global connectivity still struggles with inequalities, censorship, congestion and geopolitical bottlenecks. The Orbital Cloud is meant to plug these gaps by building a computing and communication layer above Earth — a solar-powered, space-cooled network in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) that no single nation or company fully controls.
Orbit AI’s approach brings together two new systems. The first, called DeStarlink, is a decentralized satellite network designed for global internet-style connectivity and resilient communication. The second, DeStarAI, is a set of AI-focused in-orbit data centers placed directly on satellites, using space’s naturally cold environment instead of the energy-hungry cooling towers used on Earth. When these two ideas merge, the result is a floating digital layer where information can be transmitted, processed and verified without touching terrestrial infrastructure — a key shift in how AI workloads and cloud computing may be handled in the future.
PowerBank enters the picture by supplying the electricity and temperature-control technology needed to keep these satellites running. In space, sunlight is constant and uninterrupted — no clouds, no storms, no nighttime periods where panels lie idle. PowerBank plans to provide high-efficiency solar arrays and adaptive thermal systems that help the satellites manage heat in orbit. This collaboration marks a shift for PowerBank, which is expanding from traditional solar and battery projects into the realm of digital infrastructure, AI energy systems and next-generation satellite technology.
Describing the ambition behind this move, Dr. Richard Lu, CEO of PowerBank, said: “The next frontier of human innovation isn't just in space exploration, it's in building the infrastructure of tomorrow above the Earth”. He pointed to a future market that could surpass US$700 billion, driven by orbital satellites, AI computing in space, blockchain verification and solar-powered data systems. Integrating solar energy with orbital computing, he said, could help create “a globally sovereign, AI-enabled digital layer in space, which is a system that can help power finance, communications and critical infrastructure”.
Orbit AI’s Co-Founder and CEO, Gus Liu, describes their satellites as deliberately autonomous and intelligent. “Orbit AI is creating the first truly intelligent layer in orbit — satellites that compute, verify and optimize themselves autonomously”, he said, “The Orbital Cloud turns space into a platform for AI, blockchain and global connectivity. By leveraging solar-powered compute payloads and decentralized verification nodes, we are opening an entirely new, potentially US$700+ billion-dollar market opportunity — one that combines energy, data and sovereignty to reshape industries from finance to government and Web3. PowerBank's expertise in advanced solar energy systems will be significant in supporting this initiative."
This vision is not isolated. Earlier this year, Jeff Bezos echoed a similar idea at Italian Tech Week, saying: “We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centres in space in the next couple of decades. These giant training clusters will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7 — no clouds, no rain, no weather. The next step is going to be data centres and then other kinds of manufacturing.” His comments reflect a growing industry belief that space-based data centers will eventually outperform those on Earth.
The idea gains traction because the advantages are practical. Space offers free, constant solar power. It provides natural cooling, which is one of the costliest parts of running data centers on Earth. And above all, satellites in low-Earth orbit operate beyond national firewalls and political boundaries, making them more resilient to outages, censorship and conflict. For industries that rely heavily on secure connectivity and real-time data — finance, defense, AI, blockchain networks and global cloud providers — this could become an important alternative layer of infrastructure.
The upcoming Genesis-1 satellite is designed as a demonstration mission. It will test an Ethereum wallet, run a blockchain verification node and perform simple AI tasks in orbit. If the technology works as expected, Orbit AI plans to add several more satellites in 2026, expand into larger networks by 2027 and 2028 and begin full commercial operations by the decade’s end.
To build this system, Orbit AI plans to source technologies from some of the world’s most influential players: NVIDIA for AI processors, the Ethereum Foundation for blockchain tools, Galaxy Space and SparkX Satellite for satellite components, Galactic Energy for launch systems and AscendX Aerospace for advanced materials.
If successful, the Orbital Cloud could become the first step toward a world where part of humanity’s data, computing power and digital services run not in massive buildings on Earth, but in clusters of autonomous satellites illuminated by constant sunlight. For now, the journey begins with a single launch — a test satellite aiming to show that space can do far more than connect us. It may soon help power the systems that run our economies, technologies and global communication networks.