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Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) carry a stigma, earned from a history of misaligned incentives, excessive dilution, weaker due diligence than traditional IPOs, and high redemption rates.
They were seemingly everywhere during the 2020-2021 market boom, and more often than not those SPACs crashed post-merger.
So many investors ignore SPACs altogether. But the feature they overlook is that pre-merger, your downside is capped. The trust account holds your money in cash and lets you redeem it at the vote, so you risk little while the upside stays open.
Whether a SPAC is worth holding past the vote is a separate question. That depends on positive price discovery once it trades on fundamentals, your willingness to hold through the volatility, and confidence in management's ability to execute.
You can also buy warrants for leveraged upside, though, unlike commons, they expire worthless if no deal closes.
If you've been following my research, you'd know I've bought into pre-merger SPAC setups before. I bought Boost Run commons (BRUN) and warrants (BRUNW) pre-merger, which are currently up ~150% and ~487% (even after a recent pullback). I've also done a write-up on Exascale Labs (BCAR), which is still pre-merger and trading near NAV.
One of the most promising SPAC setups I've found since is Forge Nano. The vehicle taking Forge Nano public at a $1.2B valuation is Archimedes Tech SPAC Partners II (Nasdaq: ATII), a SPAC holding $242M in trust and run by the team that took SoundHound AI (Nasdaq: SOUN) public in 2022 (now a ~$3B company).
The merger was announced April 21, 2026 and is expected to close in Q3 2026. You buy ATII commons and/or ATIIW warrants today, and they convert into NANO and NANOW on Nasdaq at close.
Here’s where the upside comes from. It sells its atomic layer deposition (ALD) machines, coating services, and lithium-ion batteries to three of the hottest markets today: (1) AI memory/logic chips, (2) photonics, and (3) defense batteries.
And it has several unfair advantages:
A $100M US Department of Energy grant, which reimburses ~42% of the cost of building its North Carolina battery factory and never has to be repaid.
Samsung SDI (Samsung's battery arm, one of the world's largest cell makers) equipping and backing that factory, with $20M invested across the deal.
A 2028 law that bans the US military and its contractors from buying Chinese battery cells, which hands Forge a captive, government-mandated buyer for exactly the US-made cells its factory is built to produce.
With ATII trading at $10.88/share today against a trust worth ~$10.63/share, the downside for commons is capped at only ~2.3%. If management executes, the upside is open-ended.
The rest of this 6,500-word deep dive covers the business, its financials and projections, the full SPAC setup, the valuation, what could go wrong, and whether I'm buying now.
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