Bending Spoons began trading on the Nasdaq on July 1 under the ticker BSP at $29 a share, above its $26 to $28 range, raising $1.68 billion. The Milan-based company was valued at $18.4 billion, up approximately 67 percent from an $11 billion private round eight months earlier. First-quarter 2026 revenue was $601 million, more than double the $259 million in the same quarter a year earlier. The company swung from a $112 million net loss to a $27.5 million net profit.
Bending Spoons did not build any of the products generating that revenue.
The Portfolio
The company has completed more than fifty acquisitions since Luca Ferrari co-founded it in 2013. The marquee names are former headliners. AOL, agreed to be purchased for $1.5 billion in October 2025. Vimeo, purchased for $1.38 billion at $7.85 per share in September 2025. Eventbrite, purchased for approximately $500 million, closing in March 2026. Evernote, acquired in January 2023. WeTransfer, acquired in July 2024. The portfolio also includes Brightcove, Komoot, StreamYard, Remini, Harvest, and MileIQ.
Every one of these products was once considered a success by the industry that produced it. AOL was half of the $182 billion AOL-Time Warner merger in January 2000, the largest corporate merger in American history at the time. Vimeo reached a market capitalization of approximately $9 billion after IAC spun it off in May 2021. Eventbrite surged 60 percent on its first day of trading in September 2018 and reached a market capitalization of $2.77 billion. Evernote was valued at $1 billion and held up as the model of a freemium software business. Every one of them declined. Vimeo by approximately 85 percent. Eventbrite by more than 80 percent. Until someone from Milan made an offer.
The Method
After acquiring a product, Bending Spoons restructures aggressively. Nearly all of Evernote's staff were let go. Seventy-five percent of WeTransfer's workforce was cut. Approximately two-thirds of Brightcove's employees were removed. Operations are consolidated in Milan. The product is kept. The company around it is replaced.
The logic is uncomfortable but arithmetically clean. Software, once built, does not require the team that built it to keep running. A product with millions of subscribers paying monthly fees is an annuity whose only variable cost is the infrastructure and the handful of engineers required to maintain it. The original company hired for growth. Salespeople, marketing teams, product managers, expansion engineers. Bending Spoons hires for maintenance. The difference between those two headcounts is the margin the market is now pricing at $18.4 billion.
The Aftermarket
In automotive manufacturing, the aftermarket is the industry of parts, service, and maintenance that exists after the original sale. It is larger than the original equipment market. The cars have already been built. The aftermarket keeps them running.
Bending Spoons has built the aftermarket for software. The products have already been created. The original companies moved on, declined, or were acquired and stripped and resold. What remains is the installed base: millions of users who still open Evernote to take notes, still use WeTransfer to send files, still buy Eventbrite tickets, still watch video on Vimeo. The products work. The users pay. The only thing that changed is the name on the invoice.
The combined peak valuations of AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and Evernote approached $200 billion. Bending Spoons acquired them for a combined approximately $4.9 billion. The IPO values the entire portfolio, including more than forty additional products, at $18.4 billion. The aftermarket captured a fraction of the original price and a multiple of the original profit.
The $18.4 billion is not a bet on innovation. It is a bet that the software industry systematically overbuilds around products that do not need it, and that someone willing to strip the cost structure and run the product at its actual operating requirements can collect the difference indefinitely. The car already runs. Someone just has to change the oil.