PowerUp Acquisition raises $250M for gaming SPAC with Jack Tretton and Bruce Hack
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Are gaming SPACs back? After a lull because of a choppy stock market, PowerUp Acquisition announced last week it was raising $250 million in an initial public offering for its special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
A SPAC is a blank check company that raises money first and then acquires a business, taking it public in a process that circumvents the longer time it takes to do an IPO.
New York-based PowerUp Acquisition is led by executive chairman Bruce Hack, the former CEO of Vivendi Games; and CEO and director Jack Tretton, the former president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America. They are joined by chief financial officer Michael Olson, CFO of Version1. Mike Vorhaus of Vorhaus Advisors is senior advisor.
Tretton used to compete head to head against Microsoft and Nintendo. And it’s ironic that former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Amie is heading his own SPAC, in partnership with United Talent Agency veterans. Their timing is interesting, as $85 billion worth of deals last year involved game companies, according to Drake Star Partners. And Drake Star expects a total of $150 billion in deals to take place in 2022, given that $85 billion in deals were already announced just in January alone.
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PowerUp Acquisition plans to leverage management’s experience to target businesses within the interactive media, digital media, sports, entertainment, and/or leisure sectors, with a particular focus on video gaming, gaming adjacent, and new metaverse video gaming businesses. I interviewed Hack and Vorhaus about their plans.
Hack said that the good thing about the long process in
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