Bending Spoons debuts at $18B valuation, using AI to transform AOL and legacy internet brands

After $18B IPO, Bending Spoons founder says success comes from minimizing luck

AOL is public again -- sort of. Its owner Bending Spoons, the 13-year-old Italian company that has been quietly acquiring beloved but ailing Internet brands for the past decade, went public on the Nasdaq today, opening at an over $18 billion valuation, with the stock then popping 40% by market close. Headquartered in Milan, Bending Spoons applied some of the private equity playbook to a long series of acquisitions -- Meetup, Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and many others. But it is not a flip-and-sell scheme: it wants to transform these companies with tech and then hold onto them. "We want to place ourselves as an operator that takes beloved brands and makes them much better," its cofounder and chief product officer, Matteo Danieli, told TechCrunch. The 'how' has generated controversy over the years, especially around layoffs. But the company also drove revenue growth, even more so with AI. "In the past year and a half, we've witnessed an incredible acceleration in the pace at which we were able to ship new features and create value for users," Danieli told TechCrunch. That may be the right thing to say when investors, public and private, have much more appetite for AI than for aging SaaS businesses. But Bending Spoons has a case: its F-1, the equivalent of S-1 forms for foreign companies, includes a chapter called 'AI before it was cool' -- a nod to its roots. Before Bending Spoons, there was Evertale, "a product that would automatically create a diary of your life by leveraging what you would call AI today, and that we called machine learning then," Danieli said. That startup failed, but it taught lessons to the cofounders and team members who now lead Bending Spoons -- Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Luca Querella, and Danieli himself. "It sparked a reflection around the fact that you don't always find perfect correlation between how talented entrepreneurs are and the success they have, especially from zero to one. Luck is a very big component of that equation. So we developed an obsession for finding a strategy that would, as much as possible, reduce the role that luck plays in growth and success," Danieli said. The company also mentioned this philosophy in its F-1 with such lines as, "Luck plays a big role in finding product-market fit," and "luck is irrelevant when pursuing operational excellence." Those mantras show up in areas like pricing its products. "We try to leverage the sophisticated data tracking, analytics infrastructure and experimentation toolkit that we've developed." According to Danieli, this sometimes leads the company to release more features for free to drive word of mouth. But it has also led to price increases that sparked complaints from long-term subscribers. Despite this, however, he says customer retention has been "remarkably stable." One acquisition was particularly scrutinized. "Evernote may be the first product we acquired that was genuinely loved by users, so we had very strict judges." That's the one he's most proud of -- including its AI-heavy v11 update. He said the company eventually won over users with its changes that were praised by many subscribers, including Evernote cofounder Phil Libin. Bending Spoons itself started getting more support over the years. Valued at $11 billion in a private equity round before its IPO, it had both VC firms and VIPs on its cap table, including big names from tech and entertainment. In its earlier years, however, VCs struggled to understand its approach. "We've got a lot of 'you're crazy' reactions throughout the years," Danieli recalled. That's also captured by the company's tagline, "Impossible. Maybe." Focusing on talent was also one of the lessons that Bending Spoons' founders learned from their Evertale days, and hiring became a focus. The co-founder Ferrari "invested the best part of the first two or three years working on culture and hiring processes. We believe we now excel at spotting talent, especially when young and when they don't have a great track record yet." The numbers seem to agree. According to its SEC filing, "in part helped by progress in AI, revenue per full-time equivalent Spooner increased from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, and was $0.97 million in Q1 2026." This also explains why Bending Spoons took the unusual decision of bringing the whole company to New York to celebrate its listing. "It's one more tool for us to access the liquidity that we need to fuel our acquisitive strategy, but we also thought that for one day it would be the right thing to take it all in and enjoy the moment with all our colleagues," Danieli said. That's just one day, though. After that, Bending Spoons will go back to buying companies -- and take advantage of slashed SaaS valuations it has itself managed to escape, according to Danieli. "From a buyer's perspective and as a company that grows through acquisitions, that's actually a great opportunity and moment to deploy capital."

There's a New Stock on the Block Today: Think of It Like an AI-Enhanced AOL

Get personalized, AI-powered answers built on 27+ years of trusted expertise. An initial public offering on Wednesday is giving investors a chance to own some old-school internet names with an AI twist. Bending Spoons, the Milan-based owner of iconic internet properties including AOL and Vimeo, priced shares at $29 ahead of its listing on the Nasdaq, which indicated a market value of more than $18 billion. The shares started trading Wednesday under the ticker symbol "BSP" a bit higher, at $31. The company is raising about $1 billion with the sale, with the potential for more if the deal's underwriters exercise their right to buy up to 5 million more shares. Bending Spoons is essentially a digital private equity firm. It acquires struggling or nascent digital properties; revamps them with "deep product, tech, and monetization work," according to co-founder and CEO Luca Ferrari; and reinvests earnings in new acquisitions. It has run that playbook on video streaming platform Vimeo, note-taking app Evernote, and file-sharing app WeTransfer. The company has recently set its sights higher: It acquired former internet giant AOL, which still operates a web portal and email service, for $1.5 billion in January, its largest acquisition to date. Bending Spoons was born out of failure. In 2010, three college friends -- Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli, and Luca Ferrari -- founded Evertale, an app that used AI to generate personal diary entries. By 2013, it was clear the business wasn't going to take off, so they liquidated it and started Bending Spoons with the $40,000 they had left over. The team went to work developing the three things to which they attribute their success: "people, proprietary technologies, and proprietary data," or what Bending Spoons calls its "Platform." The company has grown quickly. Revenue increased from $387 million in 2023 to $1.31 billion last year. First-quarter sales of $600 million put Bending Spoons on track to top $2 billion in 2026. Bending Spoons proudly says it has never sold a business, perhaps making it more of an old-web Berkshire Hathaway than a PE firm. "If you want to try to do the type of transformations that we do -- where we literally rethink things from the ground up and we integrate them so deeply into our platform that every business we own works off the same technological operating system, the same core team -- you can't sell them," Ferrari told CNBC on Wednesday. In true 2026 fashion, there's an AI angle. In its prospectus, the company boasted of embracing AI "before it was cool" with Evertale. "Our conviction in AI's potential didn't move the needle for that startup, but it has proven valuable at Bending Spoons," the prospectus says. Bending Spoons says the share of code written by or with the help of AI increased to more than 90% in the first quarter of 2026 from less than 10% a year prior. It says that's boosted productivity and helped grow revenue per "Spooner" -- otherwise known as an employee -- from $1 million in 2023 to an annual run rate of $4 million in the first quarter of this year. "We want to be trailblazers of how you use AI to reinvent how you run a business," said Ferrari on Wednesday.

Bending Spoons targets software giants in huge capital deployment

Most people have never heard of Bending Spoons. But plenty of them use its products every day. The company owns Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite, AOL, and StreamYard, among more than 50 businesses acquired since 2013. Last week, Bending Spoons (BSP) went public and laid out an ambitious roadmap. It wants to keep acquiring digital companies at scale, including aging software and internet brands that once dominated their categories but have since lost momentum. Bending Spoons built its playbook from a failed startup Before Bending Spoons existed, its founders ran a company called Evertale, an AI-powered diary app. It raised a million dollars, hired a small team, and still failed to find customers. By 2013, the founders were down to a few months of cash and no real revenue, according to a letter from the founders included in the company's IPO prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That experience shaped everything that came after. CEO Luca Ferrari and his co-founders concluded that luck, not skill, often determines whether a young company finds product-market fit. "We'd observed phenomenal entrepreneurs fail in their ventures and less remarkable ones succeed," Ferrari explained in the shareholder letter. "Even accepting that our own judgment was flawed in some cases, it was apparent that luck mattered a great deal at the early stages of a business." Operating an existing business well, on the other hand, comes down to talent and discipline, things a team can actually control. So instead of building new products from scratch, Bending Spoons started buying businesses that already had customers, then rebuilding them from the inside. The company calls this its Playbook: acquire, transform, reinvest, repeat. It has applied this approach, with internal rate of return targets of 65% on a levered basis and 25% unlevered, to deals closed between 2023 and the first quarter of 2026. Bending Spoons' revenue, profit scaled quickly * Bending Spoons reported revenue of $1.31 billion in 2025, up from $671 million in 2024 and $387 million in 2023, a compound annual growth rate of 84%. * Operating income stood at $278 million in 2025, while adjusted operating income, which excludes certain noncash and one-time costs, was $613 million, representing a 47% margin. * In the first quarter of 2026, it reported revenue of $601 million, more than double the $259 million reported in the same period a year earlier. * Net income has been choppier. The company posted a small net loss in 2025 after an $88.9 million profit in 2024, largely reflecting swings in tax expense and interest costs tied to acquisition debt. * Adjusted net income, however, climbed steadily to $375.6 million in 2025 and $206 million in the first quarter of 2026. * The balance sheet shows the scale of the buildout. Total assets stood at nearly $7 billion as of March 31, 2026, against total liabilities of $5.9 billion, much of it acquisition-related debt. Source: Bending Spoons IPO prospectus Bloomberg via Getty Images A focus on key acquisitions Bending Spoons says it has already scouted its next wave of targets. Using data from PitchBook along with its own research, the company narrowed a list of tens of thousands of private and public businesses to more than 1,000 candidates that generate between $50 million and $5 billion in annual revenue each. Roughly 791 of those targets are based in North America and 240 in Europe, together representing close to $400 billion in combined 2025 revenue. Many are established self-serve subscription or advertising businesses, the kind of aging but stable software brands that fit the pattern of past deals like AOL, Vimeo, and Eventbrite. Artificial intelligence is playing a growing role in that hunt. Bending Spoons said the share of its engineering pull requests authored or coauthored by AI jumped from under 10% in early 2025 to more than 90% by the first quarter of 2026, with around 70% written by AI alone. Revenue per employee climbed from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025 as a result, the company said. Bending Spoons raised over $1 billion via its IPO, at a share price of $29. At the time of writing, the stock trades at $36. The funds raised through the IPO will be deployed towards general corporate purposes and future acquisitions. For a company that started with $40,000 in seed money in 2013, the shift to billion-dollar acquisition math marks a significant next chapter, one investors will be watching closely over the next decade, and beyond. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published July 6, 2026 at 12:13 PM.