One SPAC's jour­ney to find a part­ner, and its race against the clock, shows tough­ness of bear mar­ket

The once-boom­ing SPAC mar­ket has been a slog this year, with merg­ers seem­ing­ly falling apart left and right. One blank check com­pa­ny’s new proxy state­ment de­tails just how chop­py the wa­ters have be­come fol­low­ing the smooth sail­ing seen in peak pan­dem­ic months.

Aes­ther Health­care Ac­qui­si­tion Corp., the SPAC that an­nounced last month it in­tends to merge with Ocean Bio­med­ical, near­ly ran up against its one-year dead­line to find a part­ner. As talks fell apart with at least three po­ten­tial part­ners due to fi­nan­cial con­cerns, Aes­ther came less than three weeks from liq­ui­dat­ing and re­turn­ing its funds to share­hold­ers.

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