Marketing tech company Banzai rang the opening bell at Nasdaq on Friday as the Seattle firm officially became a public company.
Founded in 2016, Banzai announced a year ago that it planned to go public by merging with a SPAC group led by 7GC Holdings, a partnership between San Francisco-based tech investment firm 7GC and SPAC sponsor Hennessy Capital.
Banzai provides marketing tools to help companies run webinars, virtual events, and more.
Founded by former Avalara employees in 2016, Banzai originally started as an on-demand inside sales and marketing platform. It shifted to help companies drive registrations to events. Then it pivoted again as the pandemic hit, focusing on virtual events.
“Banzai started off with simple awareness of a growing problem in marketing tech and a simple vision that we could make things better,” Banzai CEO and founder Joe Davy said Friday at Nasdaq, surrounded by employees and partners in Times Square.
Filings from the SPAC process show that Banzai posted annual recurring revenue of $22.1 million for the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 2022, and a net loss of $8.5 million.
Banzai’s customers include Square, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Thinkific, Doodle and ActiveCampaign.
Shares of Banzai, trading under the ticker BNZI, fell more than 40% in morning trading Friday.
As part of the SPAC deal, Banzai previously planned to acquire Hyros, a digital marketing and sales company, for approximately $110 million. But that acquisition was called off earlier this year.
Also known as blank check companies, SPACs form with the intent of acquiring a private company in order to take it public. SPACs re-emerged during the pandemic in a big way, as capital flowed freely and entrepreneurs used the financial instruments to more quickly enter the public markets.
But the performance of post-merger SPACs steadily dropped throughout 2022 amid the larger market slowdown and a record number of deals were spiked. There were 613 SPAC deals in 2021; just 30 have been completed this year, according to SPAC Insider.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect that Banzai is not acquiring Hyros.
