Wall Street thought 2020 was a frenetic year for special purpose acquisition companies SPACs.

Yet with more than nine months to go until the end of 2021, initial public offerings IPOs of U.S. SPACs this week surpassed the 83.5 billion the sector raised in all of 2020, data from industry tracker SPAC Research showed.

This is also more than the 29.5 billion that IPOs of companies that operate businesses as opposed to being empty shells like SPACs have raised since the start of the year, according to IPOScoop data.

The breakneck growth of what was once an obscure backwater of capital markets reflects the popularity of SPACs as an alternative vehicle to traditional IPOs. By merging with a SPAC, companies can debut in the stock market with forecasts and predictions that are not as regulated as they would be in IPO investor roadshows. In exchange, however, they often give away a larger stake of themselves than they would have in an IPO.

If you had told me at the beginning of the year that we would already exceed 2020 totals before the end of the first quarter, I would not have believed it. Its been quite phenomenal and there are no real signs of the momentum stopping meaningfully anytime soon, said Carlos Alvarez, head of permanent capital solutions at UBS Group AG.

The 200 million IPO of Build Acquisition Corp on Tuesday pushed the total raised by U.S. SPACs in IPOs above last years haul, which was already more than six times the previous alltime record, according to…