Key Points
- Bending Spoons priced its Nasdaq IPO at $29 a share, above its $26-to-$28 range, raising $1.68 billion.
- Shares closed up nearly 40% at $40.50 on their July 1 debut under ticker BSP.
- The pop lifted its market value to about $25.7 billion, more than double its $11 billion private mark.
- Its portfolio includes Evernote, WeTransfer, AOL, Vimeo and Eventbrite.
Bending Spoons, the Milan software company that buys aging internet brands and rebuilds them, priced its Nasdaq initial public offering at $29 a share — above its $26-to-$28 range — raising roughly $1.68 billion at an $18.4 billion valuation. The stock then jumped nearly 40% in its July 1 debut, closing at $40.50 and lifting its market value to about $25.7 billion, more than double the $11 billion it was worth in private markets. It trades under the ticker BSP, and the four co-founders keep control through a dual-class structure that gives their shares five votes each.
The Roll-Up Goes Public
Bending Spoons treats familiar-but-neglected digital platforms the way a collector treats trading cards. Its portfolio now spans Evernote, WeTransfer, AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Komoot and Tractive — brands it acquires outright, overhauls, and says it intends to hold permanently. The playbook is blunt: after buying Evernote the company laid off the existing staff and moved operations to Europe; WeTransfer lost a large share of its workforce; free tiers get trimmed and monetization gets tightened. We covered the model in December when Bending Spoons agreed to buy Eventbrite for $500 million.
The financials the company took public are the reason it can command this valuation. First-quarter 2026 revenue hit $601 million with $28 million in net income, a swing from a $112 million loss a year earlier, and 2025 revenue reached $1.31 billion. Bending Spoons reports more than 500 million monthly active users and nine million paying subscribers, at a striking $2.6 million of revenue per employee — a number it credits partly to automation, disclosing that AI-generated or AI-assisted code jumped from under 10 percent of its software changes a year ago to roughly 90 percent in the first quarter.
What the Debut Tests
The 40% first-day pop is a public-market vote on a thesis Bending Spoons has run privately for years: that unloved internet brands are undervalued assets rather than dying ones, and that a lean, AI-heavy engineering org can wring durable profit out of products their previous owners had written off. Clearing $29 above range and closing at $40.50 validates a version of the permanent-hold software holdco that Constellation Software built in enterprise niches — only aimed at consumer names people actually recognize. It also lands squarely inside the AI-driven IPO supercycle that has pulled a wave of tech names toward the public markets this year, from Uber-backed Lime to the confidential filings of OpenAI and Anthropic. The private markets are moving in step, with AI-infrastructure provider Together AI raising $800 million at an $8.3 billion valuation.
The founder-control structure is the asterisk. CEO Luca Ferrari and his co-founders keep super-voting stock, so public shareholders are buying the cash flows without the governance — a bet on management's discipline as much as on the model itself. For a company whose entire edge is aggressive, unsentimental operating decisions, that may be the point.
The debut was reported by TechCrunch; the pricing was reported by The Next Web, with filing details via Yahoo Finance.
Source: TechCrunch, The Next Web.
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