Commercial spaceflight startup Maritime Launch Services has completed its reverse takeover of now-defunct merchant bank Jaguar Financial Corp., and in a departure from common practice, listed its shares on Toronto’s specialist NEO Exchange for innovation-driven companies.

The deal to buy Jaguar was announced in December and finalized last month. At the time, Jaguar was trading on the TSX Venture exchange. Maritime Launch shares traded up slightly to 20 cents on Thursday for a market cap of $80.7 million.

Atlantic Canadian startups like drug discovery company IMV, video game technology company Swarmio Media and one-time unicorn Meta Materials have increasingly tapped public markets for funding in recent years. But most early-stage Atlantic companies have favoured the more widely known TSX Venture Exchange and Canadian Securities Exchange, with Maritime Launch being the first to choose the NEO.

“The listing of the company’s shares on the NEO, a premiere Canadian stock exchange, marks an important milestone for Maritime Launch and is another step along the path to Canada becoming a world-leader in the rapidly growing commercial space-launch industry,” said CEO Stephen Matier in a press release.

The Jaguar takeover, which Matier said at the time of its initial anouncement was meant to draw the attention of potential investors rather than directly raise capital, followed a prior $10.5 million funding round led by Toronto’s Primary Capital and PowerOne Capital Markets.

Maritime Launch was founded in 2016 and plans to build a rocket launchpad in Canso, NS, by 2023.

Matier and his five-person team originally said they would use rockets built by Yuzhnoye Design Office — the Ukrainian former manufacturer of ballistic missiles for the Soviet Union — but announced Thursday they had signed a letter of intent with Quebec aerospace company Reaction Dynamics to use its Aurora launch vehicles.

“Reaction Dynamics is developing launch vehicles with a unique, green fuel technology to offer to our satellite clients at a competitive cost,” said Matier. “We are striving to build a carbon neutral spaceport that will offer clients a competitive price to launch with access to the widest range of inclinations offered in North America.”

None of the players have publicly clarified what role the war in Ukraine played in the Reaction deal or whether Maritime Launch will also still buy rockets from Yuzhnoye, but the company is headquartered in Dnipro, which has faced Russian missile fire in recent days.

The NEO, meanwhile, was founded in 2015 and bills itself as a stock exchange for the innovation economy, with restrictions in place to prevent what it describes as “predatory market behaviours,” such as high frequency trading. Publicly traded startups are often small-cap stocks that are especially vulnerable to manipulation.