What just happened? Bending Spoons is going public with a model that runs counter to where much of tech investing is headed. Instead of chasing the next wave of artificial intelligence startups, the company is focused on rebuilding older, often overlooked internet platforms – and its IPO suggests investors are willing to back that approach.
The Milan-based firm raised $1.68 billion in its Nasdaq debut this week, with shares climbing 40% above the IPO price. The stock closed at $40.50, up from $29, giving the company a market value of about $25.7 billion. That's a significant jump from roughly $14.5 billion in 2025, following a funding round that included primary, secondary, and debt capital.
Bending Spoons has built its business by acquiring established but underperforming software companies and reworking them. Its portfolio includes names that still carry weight with users – Vimeo, Evernote, WeTransfer and, more recently, AOL.
"The upside of what we do is we buy these companies and rebuild them from scratch almost," Chief Executive Luca Ferrari told Bloomberg.
The changes are usually sweeping rather than incremental. The company typically cuts costs, shifts operations to its engineering teams and retools the product. Ferrari has been clear that its approach is not subtle.
"If someone wants to see nothing change, we're not a good buyer," he said in a 2024 interview with The New York Times.
Bending Spoons reported net income of $27.5 million on $601 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2026, compared with a $112 million loss on $259 million in revenue a year earlier.
Monthly active users reached 500 million in March, up from 111 million at the end of 2023, according to the filings. At the same time, the company is still in the early stages of turning that scale into revenue.
"We serve approximately half of one billion monthly active users and only monetize a little over nine million," Ferrari said. "So there's plenty of room for organic growth, even assuming we never acquire a new user ever again."
That gap – large audiences with relatively low monetization – is central to the company's strategy, according to the filings and interviews. Rather than building new products from scratch, Bending Spoons is betting it can extract more value from platforms that already have reach but haven't fully capitalized on it.
The company's roots go back to a failed app. Ferrari and his co-founders initially launched a digital diary product that didn't take off. They pivoted to acquiring and improving existing apps, starting small and gradually scaling up. Over time, that approach turned into a broader acquisition strategy backed by outside funding and debt.
That model stands apart in a market dominated by AI-driven growth stories. While investors have poured money into companies tied to artificial intelligence, Bending Spoons is targeting a different category: businesses that are no longer high-growth but still widely used.
"These are not walking dead companies," says Joe Hyrkin, who sold his platform, Issuu, to Bending Spoons. He said many of these firms have simply fallen out of favor with venture capital investors.
The company's acquisition of AOL highlights that approach. Once a defining name of the early internet, AOL was sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5 billion in 2025. The business still generates about $633 million a year through ads and membership subscriptions for services such as malware protection and tech support, the Times reported.
Bending Spoons sees a long runway for similar deals. According to its IPO filing, the company has identified more than 1,000 potential acquisition targets. That pipeline has grown as capital shifts toward AI, leaving older software companies with fewer funding options.
The strategy is not without criticism. Former employees and founders of acquired companies have described layoffs, price increases and product changes that disrupted users. Still, Ferrari has framed those moves as necessary to reset businesses that might otherwise stagnate.
Early trading suggests investors are backing the approach, based on the IPO performance. The question going forward is whether Bending Spoons can continue to find value in aging platforms – and improve them quickly enough to support its valuation.
Image credit: Bloomberg