Novo Tellus Alpha Acquisition, a spac backed by fund manager Novo Tellus, has lodged its preliminary prospectus to raise $150 million, joining the trio of spac offerings that include Vertex Technology Acquisition Corp and Pegasus Asia.
The offer totals 10 million units priced at $5 each. It consists of 9.5 million units in the placement tranche and 0.5 million units set aside for retail investors to apply.
In addition, a group of cornerstone investors are taking up 16 million units, raising another $80 million. Novo Tellus, as the sponsor, is itself taking up 4 million units, or $20 million.
NTAA is looking for targets within the technology industrials sector in the Indo-Pacific region, with a focus on investment themes built around “critical technology” and “macro growth shifts with multi-year tailwinds” such as Industry 4.0; next generation semiconductors; cloud and, or, edge computing, AI, medical life sciences; supply chain resilience for advanced engineering.
NTAA’s executive chairman and CEO is Loke Wai San, who is also the co-founder and managing partner at Novo Tellus; Keith Toh, executive director president, is also a partner at Novo Tellus; Irwin Lim, the CFO, is concurrently operating partner and CFO at Novo Tellus.
Novo Tellus is known for its investments in Singapore-listed technology companies such as AEM Holdings, ISDN Holdings, Procurri Corporation and Grand Venture Technology.
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As described in the draft prospectus, NTAA offers a “distinctive opportunity” to invest alongside one of funds managed by the sponsor, Novo Tellus, PE Fund 2, that has a “clear, repeated track record of successful investments in technology and industrials companies.”
NTAA has secured 13 cornerstone investors to subscribe for 16 million units worth $80 million. They include Venezio Investments, a subsidiary of Temasek Holdings. Incidentally, Venezio is also a cornerstone investor in VTAC, which was launched on Jan 13.
Other investors include banks investing on behalf of their clients such as DBS Bank; DBS Bank (Hong Kong); UBS Asset Management in its capacity as advisor for the Nineteen77 Global Multi-strategy Alpha Master fund.
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The cornerstone investors also include Malaysia-based fund managers Affin Hwang Asset Management and Fortress Capital Asset Management.
Local investment managers that are similarly on board include KSC (S); Maxi-Harvest Group, owned by Lee Sai Sing; Target Asset Management, run by Teng Ngiek Lian; and Heritas Capital Management.
Several prominent individuals are roped in as cornerstone investors too: Alan Wang of Asdew Acquisitions; Gerald Oh of Intuitive Capital and Ronald Ooi, former chairman and CEO of Kim Eng Holdings and current chairman of Yuanta Securities Asia Financial Services.
Credit Suisse and DBS are the joint issue managers, joint book runners, and joint underwriters. CGS-CIMB is the co-manager for this IPO.
Photo of Loke Wai San: Albert Chua/The Edge Singapore
