KnightSwan Acquisition Corp., whose nonexecutive chair is Splunk Inc. President and Chief Growth Officer Teresa Carlson (pictured), started trading on the New York Stock Exchange today following a late Thursday initial public offering.

KnightSwan is a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. SPACs, which are also known as blank-check companies, are entities created specifically to take another business public. 

A SPAC raises funds by listing its shares on a stock exchange through an IPO. Then, it acquires an established company using the proceeds from the listing and, once the transaction is completed, the acquired company becomes publicly traded.

SPAC mergers, as such deals are known, have become a popular way for tech firms to list their shares. A SPAC merger provides certain advantages over a traditional IPO process, including the fact that it can be considerably faster. But it’s believed that factors such as the expected increase in interest rates and the potential introduction of new regulations could weigh down SPAC activity.

KnightSwan priced its Thursday IPO at $10 per unit. The company offered 20 million units, each of which included one share of Class A common stock and one half of a redeemable public warrant. Each whole public warrant entitles the holder to purchase one share of Class A common stock for $11.50 per share.

RBC Capital Markets, the offering’s underwriter, has a 45-day option to purchase up to 3 million additional units at the IPO price. The offering is expected to close on January 25 subject to customary closing conditions.

KnightSwan is led by Chief Executive Officer Brandee Daly and Non-Executive Chair Carlson (pictured), who co-founded the company last year.

Daly is the founder and former CEO of C2S Consulting Group, a Virginia-based cloud consulting company. C2S Consulting Group was founded in 2015 and provides services such as cloud migration to organizations such as government agencies.

Splunk is one of the industry’s leading providers of data processing software. Enterprises use Splunk’s software for tasks such as troubleshooting outages in their cloud environments and detecting cybersecurity issues. Carlson joined Splunk last year after working at Amazon Web Services Inc. as vice president of worldwide public sector, industries and training.

Carlson, a highly regarded technology executive, founded AWS’ Public Sector organization in 2010 and grew it to a multibillion-dollar business. On its public sector web page, AWS says that tens of thousands of government, education and nonprofit customers use its cloud platform.

KnightSwan plans to merge with a company that operates in one of three areas: cloud computing, cybersecurity or mission intelligence. After a SPAC completes an acquisition and the deal is approved, the company with which the SPAC merged becomes a publicly traded firm. 

The units that KnightSwan sold in its IPO are trading under the ticker symbol “KNSW.U.” On Thursday, the company said that it expects its Class A common stock and public warrants to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbols “KNSW” and “KNSW WS,” respectively. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE