Italy's Favorite App Graveyard Digger Files For a US IPO
Italy's most interesting tech company built its entire portfolio through acquisition. Bending Spoons, the Milan-based acquirer that now owns AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, and Eventbrite, filed this week for a US IPO targeting a valuation between $20B and $22B.
The company has spent over a decade buying discarded software brands and rebuilding them into subscription machines.
The buy-and-rebuild machine.
The playbook is simple. Acquire a struggling app, cut the cost structure, overhaul the product, and convert revenue to subscriptions.
AOL is the clearest proof of concept. Bending Spoons paid $1.454B for it, and AOL delivered $333.6M in operating profits on $633M in revenue in 2025.
That's the kind of return that turns heads. Early investor Tom Colicchio told Fortune he received ~15x on his initial stake, saying "Bending Spoons covered everything else that I've done, and then some."
Revenue hit $1.31B in 2025, up 95% year-over-year (YoY), with subscriptions accounting for 93% of sales. Because Bending Spoons runs a platform of many apps, a capability built once gets reused across every business it owns.
Monthly active users grew to 500M in March 2026 from 111M in December 2023, while monthly paying customers tripled to 9M over the same period. Organically acquired customers generated 79% of new-customer revenue in 2025, while advertising expenses amounted to just 6% of revenue.
The economics
Bending Spoons spent $3.3B to acquire AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo since 2025, funded mostly through borrowings. The company entered its IPO process with a $2.8B debt package already in place, which means the proceeds from any listing need to work hard.
The valuation target of $20B to $22B represents a significant step up from the ~$14.5B the company was valued at in a 2025 funding round.
Q1 2026 net income swung to $27.5M from a $112M net loss in the same period a year earlier, a signal that the acquisition cycle is finally translating to the bottom line.
The entire thesis is that unglamorous software, run lean and priced right, compounds quietly for years, and whether the IPO price already assumes everything goes right is the only question worth asking before the shares land on Nasdaq.
