Special purpose acquisition companies, SPACs, are back.

And some aerospace and defense startups are embracing the moment.

Take Merlin.

The seven-year-old startup just announced its reverse merger with a SPAC led by inflection point asset management.

It's a deal that will value Merlin at $800 million pre-money and raise hundreds of millions of dollars in proceeds.

Founder and CEO Matt George says it will allow Merlin to move more quickly for customers.

We had a couple great options around what to do next.

And a SPAC was a really efficient way to get out into the public market and doing so with a bunch of committed capital.

So as part of the deal, we announced over $120 million

of committed capital at announcement before we even announced the deal.

We are expecting to add to that pretty significantly before we list.

Merlin is developing and deploying artificial intelligence in cockpit, injecting autonomy into a military aircraft with a plan to bring that capability to commercial jets in the future.

Our biggest and most public contract is with Socom for the C-130J, and we've now expanded that to include the KC-135 for our mobility command to enable those folks to go from two crew down to one on those large aircraft, freeing up our pilots to go do higher cognition missions and to be much more of a mission commander versus just some of the very, very basic pilotage.

On this episode, Merlin's Matt George on this emerging age of autonomy and on the things

that can be done by the startup as a publicly traded company that weren't possible staying

private.

I'm Morgan Brennan and this is Manifest Space.

Joining me now, Matt George, the founder and CEO of Merlin.

Matt, it's great to speak with you today.

Thank you.

Great to see you.

So before we get into the news, first is a little bit about what Merlin is.

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