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Distinct shells carrying a filed role for this person — not every shell they have ever touched.
SEC-verified vehicles of the same sponsor, predating these roles and carrying none of them. The badge counts them; the figure beside this one does not.
Mergers closed across all 18 — these vehicles and the franchise's earlier ones together.
Announced but not closed, and still hunting — again over all 18.
No closed vehicle here has both a stored price and a filed trust value to score it against.
8 liquidated · 1 terminated deal — weigh against the wins.
6 vehicles on file, newest listing first
7 of 7 appear on more than one · 2 vehicles carry no counterparty filing we have read
4 people on two or more of them
Ryan Gilbert is a seasoned financial services investor, entrepreneur, and SPAC sponsor who currently serves as Founder and Managing Partner of Launchpad Capital, a financial services-focused venture capital firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is Chairman of the Board of Directors of Launch One Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: LPAA), a healthcare-focused SPAC that completed a $230 million initial public offering in July 2024, with a combination period running through December 19, 2027. Gilbert also serves as an advisor to Launch Two Acquisition Corp. and is affiliated with WEN Acquisition Corp. (WENN) and Launchpad Cadenza Acquisition Corp I (LPCV), with Cadenza Ventures Management Company, LLC identified as an affiliate of his. His SPAC track record includes serving as CEO of FTAC Olympus Acquisition Corp., which merged with Payoneer (PAYO) and traded down approximately 45% post-merger, as well as CEO and co-sponsor of FTAC Parnassus Acquisition Corp. He has also served as an advisor to Phoenix Biotech Acquisition.
Gilbert brings over 20 years of global financial services expertise spanning payments, remittances, credit, security, and compliance. He was previously a Partner at Propel Venture Partners, where he represented the firm on the boards of Guideline, EaseCentral, Steady (SteadyIQ), Charlie Finance, and Grabango. He serves as Executive Chairman of SmartBizLoans, a small business lending marketplace he founded while an entrepreneur-in-residence at Venrock, and holds director positions at bKash, Bangladesh's leading remittance network, and River City Bank in Sacramento. Earlier in his career, Gilbert was co-founder and CEO of PropertyBridge, a real estate payments company that was acquired by MoneyGram International, and he served as CEO of BillFloat, a small-dollar loan and payments solution founded in 2009. He was also an early investor in Eventbrite and a founding advisor to Square. His angel investment portfolio includes Mesh Payments and Scrypt, both in the FinTech sector.
Gilbert graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is a member of the State Bar of California. His investment philosophy centers on early-stage financial services innovation, with Launchpad Capital focused on seed through Series B opportunities across payments, insurance, asset management, AI, and healthcare FinTech, primarily in the United States and Canada. Through Launchpad Capital and his SPAC vehicles, Gilbert has built a platform that bridges venture investing and public markets, leveraging his deep operating and investing experience in financial services to identify and scale companies in the sector.
This record is keyed to SEC CIK 0001821098 — the identifier this person files under in their own name. Every vehicle above is a filing made under that CIK, so “the same person on two shells” is a fact about an SEC identifier rather than about a name that happens to match.
Roles are the strings the filings used, in the order they were filed. Nothing on this page ranks them, infers seniority, or offers a reason why any two of these names recur — a recurrence is a count, and the filings that produced it are linked beside every row. We also hold 107 institutional-holder rows on these vehicles, under 46 distinct name strings, and none of them is counted across vehicles: that table has no CIK column, and matching holders by name would merge firms that are not the same firm.