SPACInsider

On this week's podcast, we speak with Heliogen Founder & CEO Bill Gross about their new type of renewable power plant that uses AI to direct thousands of mirrors at a single point. This can generate dozens of megawatts of power, as well as potential heat and hydrogen outputs for industrial clients and grids beyond. We also speak with Phyllis Newhouse, CEO of Athena Technology Acquisition Corp., to get the SPAC-side view of the transaction, as well as some of the differentiators its all-female team brought to the table.

Jim Zukin, Co-Founder of Houlihan Lokey, discusses the launch of Zukin Certification Services and, more importantly, the Z-SPAC certification.  The Z-SPAC cert confirms that a SPAC is ready to combine with a target company, but listen in to hear all the details on what goes into actually being "ready".

On this week's episode we talk with Planet Co-Founder and CEO Will Marshall about the private space sector. Planet announced a $2.3 billion business combination with dMY Technology Group IV in July. Planet provides data services to a raft of industries powered by its fleet of 200 satellites generating a complete image of the earth's surface every day.  dMY Technology CEO Niccolo de Masi also joins us to discuss the SPAC side of the transaction and why he's been eager to get a deal done with Planet since his first SPAC. 

As a special bonus episode, we talked Niccolo de Masi, the CEO of the dMY Technology SPACs, three of which have already completed successful combinations and with dMY IV looking to close their combination shortly. We cover Niccolo's view of the current state of the SPAC market and how he and his team approach working with companies to take them public via the SPAC route.

On this week's podcast, we speak with Aurora Co-Founder and CEO Chris Urmson, on the future of driverless technology in both the freight trucking and taxi markets. We talk about the winding path that autonomous vehicles have taken and what steps are still necessary for Aurora to debut its first driverless trucks in 2023. Will people even drive cars in the future? Take a listen.

On this week's podcast, we speak with Gogoro's Co-Founder and CEO Horace Luke about the future of mobility in Asia and their innovative new business model in the middle of the electric vehicle revolution. Namely, the advantages of battery swapping for e-bikes and mopeds in the Asian markets. 

This week on the SPACInsider podcast we talk about how Quanergy makes lidar arrays for a variety of navigation and imaging applications ranging from autonomous vehicles to smart cities and crowd control. Each of these subsectors differ as both technical challenges and business opportunities. We also discuss how many standalone lidar companies the public markets can handle as new niches and applications continue to be found.

On this week's podcast, we speak with Embark's Co-Founder and CEO Alex Rodrigues, on the future of self-driving and revolutionizing freight trucking. Embark announced a business combination with Northern Genesis II (Nasdaq: NGAB) on June 23rd of this year. Embark's technology allows trucks to navigate completely autonomously along long stretches of highway and its platform is already in use on public roads. We talk about how the challenge of driverless trucks are different from driverless cars and while we'll be seeing many more of them much sooner than you think. Take a listen

This week on the SPACInsider Podcast, we will be speaking with Greg Kress, CEO of Shapeways. Shapeways, which announced a combination with Galileo Acquisition Corp. in April, allows customers to have digitally designed products manufactured and sent to them via its unique software platform. It is at the center of the fascinating additive manufacturing space, which has seen a bevy of SPAC transactions. We talk about the forces driving the adoption of additive manufacturing and the economics of providing 3D-printing and other tools at the different levels of the value chain.