Warburg Pincus Capital Corporation I-B (WPCB)

Warburg Pincus Capital Corporation I-B was a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, organized as a Cayman Islands exempted company and sponsored by an affiliate of Warburg Pincus, the New York-based private equity firm. It had no operating business. Its purpose was to raise money from public investors, hold it in a trust account and use it to merge with a private company, taking that company public. It was one of two sister SPACs the firm launched at the same time.

The company priced its initial public offering on March 5, 2021, selling 50 million units at $10.00 each for $500 million on the New York Stock Exchange. Each unit held one Class A ordinary share and one fifth of a warrant to buy a share at $11.50. The units traded as WPCB.U, and once they separated the shares and warrants traded on their own, with the shares under WPCB. Its sibling vehicle, Warburg Pincus Capital Corporation I-A, listed alongside it.

Warburg Pincus executive Christopher Turner served as chairman and chief executive, and the SPAC said it would look for businesses with strong growth prospects that could benefit from the firm's global investing experience and networks. It did not limit itself to a single industry. The offering came during the peak of the 2020 and 2021 SPAC boom, when hundreds of similar companies were competing for targets, and valuations and investor appetite for SPAC mergers cooled sharply over the following year.

In February 2023 the company announced that it would not complete a business combination within the time allowed by its charter and would instead redeem all of its public shares. It expected the Class A shares to trade for the last time on March 9, 2023, with redemption effective at the close of business on March 10, 2023, at roughly $10.20 per share after setting aside funds for taxes and dissolution costs.

The warrants carried no redemption rights and expired worthless when the company wound up. The NYSE was expected to file a Form 25 to delist the securities, and the company planned to file a Form 15 to end its reporting obligations under the Securities Exchange Act. With that, the WPCB ticker disappeared from the market without the SPAC ever announcing a merger target, one of many blank-check companies of its vintage to return cash to investors.