- Bending Spoons is marketing 58 million shares at $26 to $28 each, targeting an early-July Nasdaq debut at around a $19B valuation
- The Milan-based company owns Vimeo, WeTransfer, AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, and more than 50 other digital brands
- Revenue more than doubled to $601M in the first quarter of 2026, with the company swinging from a $112M loss to a $27.5M profit year-on-year
The Italian software company that quietly bought AOL, Vimeo, and Eventbrite is heading to Wall Street. Bending Spoons is seeking to raise as much as $1.62 billion in a U.S. initial public offering, Reuters reported, marketing 58 million shares at $26 to $28 each for an early-July debut on the Nasdaq under the ticker BSP.
At the top of that range, the Milan-based company would carry a valuation of approximately $19 billion, up from the $11 billion valuation it secured just eight months ago when it raised $710 million from T. Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford, and Cox Enterprises.
Around 60% of the shares will be sold as primary stock, with the remainder coming from existing investors including Baillie Gifford. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Allen & Co are leading the offering, backed by a 14-bank syndicate that also includes European institutions such as UniCredit, Intesa Sanpaolo, and BNP Paribas.
A $40,000 investment that became a $19B empire
The Bending Spoons story starts with failure. In 2013, co-founders Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella, and Tomasz Greber were left with $40,000 after their first venture-backed startup collapsed. They used that to found Bending Spoons in Copenhagen, with no outside capital, no runway, no safety net. The company later relocated to Milan and spent its first decade building mobile apps before making its first major acquisition: Evernote, the once-ubiquitous note-taking app, in January 2023.
What followed was one of the fastest acquisition runs in European tech history. According to its SEC filing, the company has now completed more than 50 acquisitions, assembling a portfolio of recognisable digital brands that includes WeTransfer, Brightcove, Komoot, StreamYard, Remini, Harvest, and MileIQ. In 2025 alone it bought Vimeo for $1.38 billion in September and AOL for $1.5 billion in October. Eventbrite followed in March 2026 for around $500 million.
The ten core businesses — AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Harvest, Komoot, Remini, StreamYard, Vimeo, and WeTransfer — generated more than 80% of revenue in the first quarter of 2026.
The playbook: buy, restructure, keep forever
Bending Spoons operates a model that is closer to private equity than traditional software development. It targets established digital brands it believes are underperforming, acquires them, slashes operational costs, overhauls pricing, and rebuilds the underlying technology. The company has stated explicitly that it has never sold a material business — the model assumes permanent ownership of every asset.
The restructuring is often severe. After acquiring WeTransfer, it laid off 75% of staff. After Vimeo closed in late 2025, it cut most of the workforce including the entire video team. After Komoot closed, it let go of three-quarters of employees. The pattern is consistent enough that it has drawn criticism from some of the companies’ original founders.
But the financial mechanics appear to work. What distinguishes Bending Spoons from a traditional roll-up is AI. According to the SEC filing, the proportion of code changes authored or co-authored by AI across its engineering operations rose from under 10% in the first quarter of 2025 to more than 90% a year later, with around 70% written entirely by AI. The result: revenue per employee more than doubled from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million by 2025, a productivity gain almost entirely driven by AI-assisted engineering rather than headcount growth. In 2025, the company received around 800,000 job applications and hired just 286 people.
A test for software IPO appetite
The listing arrives at a moment of renewed confidence in U.S. public markets. Companies have raised approximately $150 billion through 179 U.S. IPOs so far in 2026, the strongest start since 2021 according to Dealogic, with SpaceX and Cerebras Systems among the high-profile technology debuts that have helped restore investor appetite.
For Bending Spoons, the IPO is both a liquidity event and a strategic move. The capital is earmarked for further acquisitions — the company has mapped more than 1,000 potential targets with an aggregate annual revenue of $400 billion, and its own pitch is that AI disruption will lower acquisition prices as more founders struggle to adapt and look for exits.
The listing also reflects a broader pattern: Europe’s most valuable technology companies increasingly bypass local exchanges for Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange, joining Revolut, Klarna, and others that have concluded the valuation premium on U.S. markets outweighs the cost of listing abroad.
Whether public investors will back the model at $19 billion is the open question. Bending Spoons is profitable, growing fast, and operationally distinctive. The concern is what happens if the assets it owns — AOL, note-taking apps, file transfer services — prove to be melting ice cubes that AI accelerates rather than saves. There is no exit valve in the model. Bad deals show up as impairments, not divestitures.
