LONDON — British electrical car producer Arrival started buying and selling on the Nasdaq Thursday following a merger with a U.S. blank-check firm.

The corporate finalized its mixture with CIIG Merger Corp, a particular function acquisition firm (SPAC) arrange by former Marvel CEO Peter Cuneo, on Wednesday. It is now value roughly $13 billion, up from a valuation of $5.4 billion in November.

Shares of the corporate sank round 15% Thursday morning ET time, hitting a low of roughly $18 earlier than trimming losses. That got here as different high-growth tech names additionally fell amid a broad decline in U.S. inventory markets.

SPACs have turn into a hot investment vehicle on Wall Road, luring in a number of high-growth tech companies trying to checklist their shares with out having to undergo the standard preliminary public providing course of.

Capital raised by blank-check companies to this point in 2021 has already outpaced the total issuance in all of last year, in line with knowledge from SPAC Analysis, worrying some buyers that the market could possibly be in a bubble.

“We’re underneath the very same factor that any public firm goes by way of,” Avinash Rugoobur, Arrival’s president, advised CNBC Wednesday in an interview forward of the itemizing.

Rugoobur mentioned the deal was about an “alignment of imaginative and prescient” with Arrival’s SPAC sponsor, including that the $660 million the corporate raised in gross proceeds would assist it construct extra factories and get began on manufacturing.

Arrival is not the primary firm to go public through a SPAC merger. Nikola and Canoo each went public utilizing the identical financing technique final 12 months.

Competitors within the electrical car, or EV, house has been heating up over the previous few years, with start-ups like Lucid Motors within the U.S. and Nio in China aiming to tackle Elon Musk’s Tesla.

However Arrival says it is totally different to different gamers. That is as a result of the corporate focuses on the industrial sector for EVs as an alternative of attempting to promote them to shoppers. Its merchandise embody electrical vans and buses, not vehicles.

“We discover loads of demand within the industrial phase,” Mike Ableson, CEO of Arrival’s North America automotive enterprise, advised CNBC. “Fleet operators have their very own targets on lowering emissions and are actually crying out for extra EV merchandise.”

One other factor separating Arrival from different main companies within the EV house, equivalent to Tesla, is that it designs its personal batteries and different elements in-house somewhat than counting on third-party suppliers. In the meantime, Arrival plans to construct its automobiles from what it calls “microfactories,” that are a lot smaller than conventional auto manufacturing services and might be packed into current warehouses.

Final week, Arrival introduced that it’s constructing a second microfactory in Charlotte, North Carolina, the place its U.S. headquarters are positioned. The corporate, which hasn’t but begun manufacturing on its automobiles, plans to assemble its vans there for a fleet order from UPS beginning within the second half of 2022.

In February, Arrival signed a partnership with First Bus, a unit of FirstGroup, to trial the usage of zero-emission buses on Britain’s roads.

One in every of Arrival’s most important opponents is arguably Rivian, an Amazon-backed agency which produces electrical vehicles. Arrival signed a industrial settlement final 12 months with United Parcel Service to offer it with 10,000 electrical vans. Amazon in 2019 ordered 100,000 electric vans from Rivian in a push to make the corporate’s fleet run fully on renewable power.