Khosla bets big on the SPAC boom, raising $1.2B in 3 IPOs

Vinod Khosla, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems who went on to become a VC at Kleiner Perkins and his own firm, filed on Friday to raise $1.2 billion in three "blank check" IPOs.

Menlo Park-based Khosla Ventures filed plans Friday to raise $1.2 billion total via initial public offerings for three special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). As with other such entities, Khosla's blank-check companies plan to use the money they raise to take public three yet-to-be-determined private operating companies in reverse mergers.

With the growing number of SPACs and the fact that their managers typically have between 18 and 24 months to complete a merger deal with their IPO money, competition among them to find good acquisition candidates is growing rapidly.

Khosla didn't specify in its filings what types of companies in which industries its three SPACs will target, but it emphasized its experience in finding and backing successful tech companies.

"Technology and new inventions have always shaped the human world, and have disrupted the way we live and work, and yet we are only at the beginning of an even larger cycle of innovation and disruption," Khosla founder Vinod Khosla wrote in the prospectus of one of his firm's new SPACs. "Our team are among the few in the pole position for this race because of our experience with technology development and commercialization."

The report says, all three of the firm's SPACs plan to sell shares at $10 each and list on the Nasdaq. Unlike most other "blank check" offerings, Khosla's won't offer initial investors warrants to buy more shares at a cheap price after the SPACs complete their mergers.