Pioneer as a Case Study: Israeli SPAC Companies Leave Wall Street at a Loss

The Israeli fintech company Pioneer is in talks to be acquired by the private Canadian fintech company Nuvei for $2.7 billion, Reuters reported this week. Pioneer provides small and medium-sized businesses with solutions that allow them to carry out cross-border transactions, including receiving payments, holding foreign currency and paying employees’ salaries. The company was founded in 2005 by Yuval Tal and Yaniv Tzchik, and although it is now run from the United States by John Kaplan, 51% of its employees are based in Israel, about 1,250 based on the number of employees at the end of 2025.

Following the Reuters report, Pioneer’s share price jumped 24.3% to a market value of about $2.1 billion. But the current deal reflects the fate of many SPAC companies. Those that entered the stock market in a blaze of publicity are leaving it a few years later, having destroyed significant value. In Pioneer’s case, that means a loss of half a billion dollars, after it merged into a SPAC at a valuation of $3.3 billion.

Five years have passed since SPAC offerings became the biggest hype in the U.S. capital market. The year 2021 created perfect conditions for the phenomenon, interest rates were near zero, money was cheap, and investors were looking for new investment channels and risk levels. The result was a record number of SPAC offerings and mergers. These are shell companies that were listed on the stock exchange and raised money from the public in order to find a private company and merge with it. For private companies, this created an easier route to the public market, and competition among SPAC companies for merger targets led to many immature and loss-making companies also reaching the stock exchange through SPAC mergers. Later, amid investor disappointment with companies that merged via SPAC and other changes such as rising interest rates and a focus on profitable companies rather than just growing ones, investor appetite for such mergers fell sharply, and a sense of aversion to companies that had merged also developed. The result was that many companies lost large portions of their value after the merger.

Pioneer is not alone. A double-digit number of Israeli companies, or companies with ties to Israel, usually from various technology sectors, reached trading on Nasdaq and in New York through SPAC mergers. Today, the number of these companies that have been sold and ended their lives as independent public companies is growing, and Pioneer is just the latest example. For instance, IronSource, which offered solutions for app developers, was the Israeli company with the highest valuation in a SPAC merger when it began trading in 2021 at a valuation of $11.1 billion. Like many companies in the market, the stock later plunged, and in its merger with the American company Unity, a year and a half after becoming public, IronSource was valued at about a quarter of the level at which it had reached Wall Street, a little over $2.9 billion in a cash-and-stock deal.

Even in smaller deals, the sale valuations received by the companies were in double-digit percentage terms below those they had when they began trading through SPAC mergers. For example, the adtech company Innovid, which developed a solution for digital advertising on smart TVs, was sold at the end of 2024 for $525 million, which at the time was a 94% premium to its market value but about 60% below the $1.3 billion valuation at which it began trading. The satellite communications technology company Spikes, sold about a year ago for $280 million, had attracted additional interested buyers, but the amount was still about 23% below its valuation at the time of its SPAC merger. Another deal has not yet been completed, in which the company Talkspace, which offers virtual mental health treatment and was founded by the Israeli entrepreneurs Oren and Roni Frank, is being sold to the healthcare services company Universal Health Services for $835 million, about 40% less than the company’s valuation in its SPAC merger.

In other cases, the sale price was not reported. For example, the auto-tech company Autonomo merged in a stock deal with a private company after its share price fell 94% from the time it reached Wall Street. In an even more extreme case, the Israeli company Selina, which operated hospitality complexes around the world, collapsed, entered insolvency proceedings, and some of its assets were sold as part of the process to a company from Singapore. Both Autonomo and Selina were valued at more than $1.2 billion when they merged with SPAC companies.