Banzai International

Banzai International operated a virtual events and webinar platform called Demio, targeting marketing teams. The company merged with 7GC & Co Holdings in December 2023, one of the very last SPAC mergers to close.

Banzai was emblematic of late-stage SPAC desperation — a tiny company with under million in annual revenue that had no business being public. The SPAC structure allowed it to access public markets despite having metrics that would never survive traditional IPO scrutiny.

The stock experienced extreme volatility post-merger due to its tiny float, briefly spiking before crashing over 98%. Revenue remained minimal and losses were enormous relative to the company's size. The webinar market was dominated by established players like Zoom, Webex, and Microsoft Teams.

Banzai became a case study in how the late-stage SPAC market scraped the bottom of the barrel for merger targets, leaving retail investors holding shares in micro-cap companies with no competitive moat.