Bending Spoons is now listed on Wall Street, something it was pursuing for five years. The Italian company has managed to raise $1.68 billion in its IPO in the US. It has done so with an initial price of $29 per share, well above the range that had been initially set. That makes its market capitalization at that time $18.4 billion, when in 2025 the valuation was $14.5 billion. The curious thing is not its growth, but the way to achieve it.
A tribute to ‘The Matrix’. Founded in Milan in 2013, Bending Spoons takes its name from a famous movie scene science fiction from the late 90s. In it a child explains to Neo that we should not try to bend the spoon, but rather understand that the spoon does not exist. The company was born from the ashes of Evertale, a failed Danish startup of its same founders, including its current CEO, Luca Ferrari.
Buying companies that are going bankrupt. The company is dedicated to buy companies in trouble. Throughout its history it has purchased more than 50 stagnant apps and websites, including Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup, Vimeo, Eventbrite and, the most important of all, AOL.
Your relentless recipe for success. He always does it with the same strategy: identify a popular product but in decline, he buys it, redesigns it and completely rewrites your technology if necessary and then convert your existing users into customers of a subscription model. No matter how uncomfortable or crude it may seem, the business works: in the first quarter of 2026 it already declared a net profit of $27.5 million on $601 million in revenue. Last year it lost $112 million on revenue of $259 million. The growth is enviable: it has gone from 111 million active users at the end of 2023 to 500 million in March 2026, and paying users have gone from 3 to 9 million in the same period.
An easy company to hate. The Bending Spoons pattern repeats over and over again: after acquiring a company carries out a drastic staff cut and it also tends to raise the price of subscriptions to the services it purchases. With Evernote virtually fired to the entire original workforce, with WeTransfer got rid of 75% of employees and after buying Vimeo too made numerous layoffs of the video equipment. In fact, in 2025 Bending Spoons allocated more than $78 million to restructuring expenses after absorbing the staffs of AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo.
AI as a driver. Although Bending Spoons does not present itself as an AI company, it does highlight that it uses AI as an efficiency driver. Like others in recent times, the company boasts that around 90% of its code is already developed with the help of AI. According to its CEO, Luca Ferrari, this has allowed it to double its income per employee up to 2.57 million dollars in 2025, a figure that even exceeds that of giants like Apple. The company actually pays high salaries to its European engineers while continuing to buy companies at bargain prices.
Source: Investors’ Chronicle.
And they will continue to buy. The CEO of Bending Spoons has made it clear that this money raised on the stock market is not the end point of the activity, but rather it is fuel to continue buying companies in trouble. The company aims for between three and five new acquisitions per year. The curious thing is that we are at a time when this strategy is promising, because AI has already made it clear that the threat to SaaS businesses (Software as a Service) is notable. And Bending Spoon will be there to take advantage of its moment.
Image | Warner Bros.
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