$150m raised in energy transition-focused IPO co-run by Sova Capital, EarlyBirdCapital

By Andrei Skvarsky.

London-based brokerage Sova Capital and U.S. boutique investment bank EarlyBirdCapital have acted as joint book runners for a successful initial public offering (IPO) aimed at funding an energy transition project for emerging and frontier markets.

Oxus Acquisition Corp., a Kazakh special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), raised $150m through its IPO on the Nasdaq Capital Market on September 3, according to the Law360 legal intelligence website.

Sova said in a statement that Oxus plans to use the money to buy out a company specialising in energy transition technologies.

A SPAC or blank-cheque company is a firm that conducts no commercial operations itself and has been set up solely for acquiring another company.

Oxus, which is headquartered in Almaty but incorporated in Cayman Islands, is not formally restricted to any specific industry or geographical region in its search for a company to acquire.

But it plans to spend its IPO-raised money on a company that specialises in energy transition technologies, doing business in fields such as battery materials, energy storage, electric vehicle infrastructure or advanced recycling and operating in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Asia, the Middle East or North Africa.

Sova is not a U.S.-registered entity and therefore operates in the United States, as it has done in the Oxus IPO, under a chaperoning arrangement with New York-headquartered global brokerage Auerbach Grayson.

Sova said Oxus is the first SPAC to focus on energy transition technologies for emerging and frontier markets and the first non-Russian-based CIS SPAC to have gone public.

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