Bending Spoons Soars 40% on Nasdaq Debut After $1.7B IPO

An Italian rollup crashes the US IPO party

Bending Spoons, the Milan-based holding company that owns AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Evernote and WeTransfer, closed its first day of Nasdaq trading at $40.50 on July 1 — up 39.66% from its $29 IPO price — giving the company a market cap of roughly $25.7 billionreuters +1. The Italian firm raised $1.7 billion in the offering, pricing above its $26–$28 target range at a valuation of $18.4 billion, the largest European tech listing since 2023forbes +1.

The AOL profit engine powering the valuation

The surprise star of the prospectus is AOL, acquired for $1.45 billion in January 2026. The legacy brand generated $633.4 million in revenue and $333.6 million in operating income on a 2025 historical-adjusted basis — roughly 66% of the company's total pro forma operating income despite supplying only 24% of revenuets2. After the first-day pop, the business traded at approximately 9.9 times pro forma 2025 revenue, up from 7.1 times at the IPO pricets2. AOL now accounts for nearly half of Bending Spoons' total revenueforbes.

Buy, rebuild, hold — with AI as the accelerant

Founded in 2013 by four Italian college friends — Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Francesco Patarnello, and Luca Querella — Bending Spoons has acquired more than 50 stalled apps and internet brands, describing its ambition as "a hybrid between a private equity firm and Google"forbes. The playbook involves cutting staff, centralising infrastructure, raising prices, and dispatching Milan-based engineers to rebuild products. Revenue per full-time employee climbed from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, aided by AItechcrunch. By Q1 2026, over 90% of Bending Spoons' code was being written or co-authored by AIts2.

Subscriptions made up 84% of Q1 2026 revenue, with net revenue retention of 94% and a revenue-weighted average subscriber tenure of eight yearsts2. Ferrari told Axios the company has identified more than 1,000 acquisition targets and expects to close three to five deals per yearaxios. The balance sheet reflects that ambition: at March 31, the company carried $3.93 billion in non-current long-term debt, and first-quarter interest expense of $93.2 million absorbed most of the quarter's $120.2 million in operating incomets2.

Validators and skeptics size up the debut

Matt Kennedy of Renaissance Capital called the deal "a data point for the software industry," while cautioning that BSP's profile differs sharply from most software IPOs in the pipelinets2. Tim Schumacher, founder of saas.group, was blunter: "Bending Spoons isn't really a software holding company. It's a high-conviction venture bet wearing a holding company's clothes," he said, questioning whether a debt-fuelled software factory could outlast a full market cyclets2. The four co-founders emerged with a combined stake worth $8.9 billion, while backers including Baillie Gifford and Renaissance Partners booked substantial paper gainsforbes.