Top 3 SPAC Targets – AI-Powered Biotech

After a quiet stretch in the SPAC market, we pressed pause on this column. But with deal flow picking up, targets getting more creative, and sponsors back in hunting mode, it’s the right time to bring back one of our favorites: the Top 3 SPAC Targets. Read on to see who we picked for targets developing AI-applications in the drug discovery and disease screening spaceI

SPACs have always played a major role in listing pre-commercialization biotech firms that otherwise have a narrow range of options, but the emergence of AI technology in drug discovery has the potential to change the game for both biotech and SPACs.

Already, Montes Archimedes merged in 2021 with Roivant (NASDQA:MAAC), which uses an internal AI computing platform to acquire and advance drug candidates for later exits, and it has been enduringly successful. Roivant has since repeatedly used its post-listing cash to re-invest in its former spinoff Immunovant (NASDAQ:IMVT) that itself merged with SPAC Health Sciences in 2019. Today, both companies trade above $21.

These two are bright spots in an industry where durable SPAC biotech successes have been difficult to find. In fact, they are among just 11 biotech de-SPACs that currently trade above their $10 deal price once adjusted for stock splits. That’s out of 85 total deals dating back to May 2019 and the drop-off is steep. Only 21 others last closed above $4.

The other eight companies in the “above $10 club”, meanwhile run the gamut of drug discovery treatment areas and do not share any other striking commonality.

Over the past three months, both Perceptive Capital (NASDAQ:PCSC) and RF (NASDAQ:RFAI) have placed their bets on repeating a play like Roivant. RF II announced a $1.5 billion combination with AI drug discovery platform Nanyang Biologics in October, while Perceptive unveiled its own $1.1 billion tie-up with AI cancer screening firm in December.

Here are three more potential target companies SPACs may want to consider:

Owkin

Agentic AI is expected to be the next wave of innovation in applications after large language models and generative AI have soaked up much of the attention over the past two years.

Consumer agentic AI applications are still working out the kinks, as was demonstrated by the WSJ’s recent experiment with an agentic AI-managed vending machine that ended in a comedy of errors. But, Paris-based Owkin is making major strides in using the technology in cancer screenings.

The company has already secured regulatory approval for its MSIntuit product, which uses an AI agent to evaluate colorectoal (CRC) tumor biopsies against thousands of other sets of imaging that has been shown to reduce the need for additional biopsies in 50% of cases and avoid 70% of surgical resections.

Owkin is now beginning the clinical trial process for its RlapsRisk product, which use a similar approach to build treatment models for breast cancer and risk assessment tools around potential relapses. It has seven more AI diagnostic tools in the pipeline and is has used its technology to advance its first drug candidate, OKN4395, into Phase I trials with an indication for solid tumor treatment.

In October 2025, Owkin launched K Pro, which has transformed what it has learned into an agentic AI enterprise platform that drug developers can use as a research “co-pilot”. This is already in use by clients and has already shown in cases to have proactively avoided potential trial failures and accelerated drug target identification timelines by 70%.

This presumably gives the company some ongoing revenue and balance sheet breathing room, but it has not raised private capital since its 2021 Series B that pushed its valuation above $1 billion with $304 million in total capital raised to date.

BPGBio

Waltham, Massachusetts-based BPGbio  has taken a similar two-pronged approach of developing AI diagnostic tools while also advancing its own drug candidates, but it has leaned much more heavily on the latter.

It now has eight potential treatments in clinical development, three of which have already reached Phase II and two more have completed Phase I trials. In all, it has discovered 75 potential treatment programs through its NAi causal modeling program, 28 of which are in the oncology space and 19 point to potential Parkinson’s treatments.

That is an incredibly wide clinical pipeline, and thus the company’s thesis for how it could put investor capital to work pretty much writes itself. Much of muscle behind BPGbio’s NAi engine came from data assembled by fellow startup Berg, which reportedly invested about $400 million into the effort before selling its assets on to BPGbio in 2023.

BPGbio is itself backed by private equity group Phoenix Genesis. Now that it has had a chance to move the ball downfield with several of these discoveries since the Berg acquisition, this could be the right moment for Phoenix to gain some liquidity while maintaining longer-term upside.

Iktos

Iktos arguably takes all of this one step further. The systems it offers clients and uses for its own internal drug discovery starts with its Makya generative AI platform. Makya operates as a SaaS platform that helps users create molecules for de novo drug design with a focus on optimizing structure and utilizing accessible synthetic inputs.

This work is then fed into Iktos’ Spaya retrosynthesis AI platform that identifies the most feasible synthetic production routes with an eye to converting a company’s target compounds into commercially available materials to begin manufacturing test doses for trials or mass producing them for sale.

In effect, this gets two distinct AI engines working with one another and working solutions back and forth between them until ideally an optimal approach is found. That could in theory replicate the equivalent of two whole research teams with workflow coming to a conclusion significantly faster.

Iktos, which, like Owkin, is based in Paris, aims to take things one step further for clients by providing software that can integrate into autonomous robotic labs doing the processing and purification work. It has worked with drug developers on about 60 different research collaborations using these tools.

On its own drug discovery side, it has advanced one potential treatment for inflammation and auto-immune diseases, MTHFD2, to a status as a preclinical candidate while it has claimed potential discoveries that it aims to study for combatting obesity and cancer as well.

Since its founding in 2016, Itkos has been backed by European venture capital, with its most recent capital raise being a €15.5 million ($18.1 million) Series A in 2023 and may have put some of that to work in its 2024 acquisition of French peer Synsight. This also puts Iktos in a timeframe to be thinking about its next capital infusion.

The list of SPACs currently searching specifically for a biotech or healthcare target has shrunk from years past to just eight at the moment. But, the list of searching SPACs that stated an interest in their S-1s in investment opportunities that in some way leverage AI innovations would certainly be longer than the those looking definitively in a different direction.

And, in this drug discovery and disease-screening corner of the market, there are many intriguing options for targets already putting AI to work.