Bending Spoons, an Italian company most people have never heard of, is now worth about 18.4 billion dollars. It went public on Nasdaq on 1 July, raising 1.7 billion dollars in the largest European startup listing in years, and its stock jumped more than 30 percent on the first day. The business it runs is unusual. Founded in 2013 by Luca Ferrari and three cofounders after their first app flopped, it makes its money by buying tired internet brands that others have written off and squeezing new life, and new profit, out of them.
The portfolio reads like a tour of the early internet. Bending Spoons has bought more than 50 digital properties, among them AOL, Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Brightcove, and Meetup. AOL alone cost 1.45 billion dollars last year and now accounts for about half of the company's revenue. Ferrari likes to describe the model as a mix of Berkshire Hathaway and a technology company, buying durable products and holding them for the long term while rebuilding whatever runs underneath.
The method is consistent and, for the people who work there, often brutal. Bending Spoons targets products that are still profitable but stagnant, rebuilds their technology on shared infrastructure, cuts costs deeply, and raises prices on the users who remain. After it bought Evernote, the annual subscription climbed from 100 dollars to 249, and yet revenue still grew. The company leans hard on artificial intelligence, which now writes roughly 90 percent of its new code, and it runs extraordinarily lean, generating some 2.57 million dollars of revenue for every employee. Of the 1,830 people who came with its 2025 deals, it expects only a few hundred to remain.
The scale is real. Revenue reached 1.3 billion dollars in 2025 and has doubled since 2024, though the model runs on borrowed money, with about 6 billion dollars of debt on the balance sheet and heavy interest to service. The listing turned the four founders into billionaires several times over, with a combined stake worth close to 8.9 billion dollars. Ferrari says he is planning 10 or 20 years ahead and wants three to five acquisitions a year. For a generation of once famous internet names, that makes Bending Spoons either a rescuer or an undertaker, depending on where you happen to sit.
