Bending Spoons is heading for Nasdaq with the kind of numbers public investors like: fast revenue growth, a sudden profit, and a ruthless operating model hiding under familiar internet brands.
There’s a lazy version of this story where Bending Spoons is just another software roll-up, buying tired names and cutting until the spreadsheet looks better. Don’t stop there. The Milan company has filed for a U.S. IPO, and its first-quarter numbers show why the market is taking it seriously.
According to Axios, Bending Spoons booked $601 million in revenue in Q1 2026 and could reach a valuation of about $20 billion in the listing. The company’s filing also shows the harder turn in the business: revenue rose from $259 million in the same quarter a year earlier, net income swung from a $112 million loss to a $27.5 million profit, and operating profit more than doubled in 2025 to $278 million. You don’t have to like the method to understand the appeal.
CEO Luca Ferrari co-founded Bending Spoons in 2013 after an earlier startup failed, and the company has spent the years since buying products people still recognize but no longer expect to lead anything. Evernote. WeTransfer. Vimeo. AOL. Eventbrite. The list sounds less like a venture portfolio than a drawer full of internet habits that never quite disappeared. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Allen & Company are leading the IPO, according to Axios, which puts this offering squarely in front of investors looking for something more profitable than the usual growth story.
The company’s strategy is blunt. It buys software products with existing users, moves control closer to its Milan operation, raises prices where it can, and cuts staff hard. At Evernote, layoffs followed the 2023 acquisition. TechCrunch reported in 2024 that Bending Spoons planned to cut about 75% of WeTransfer’s workforce after buying the file-transfer service. After the Vimeo acquisition, The Verge reported that former employees said most of the staff had been laid off, including the video team.
That is the part investors shouldn’t glide past. Bending Spoons is not selling a soft story about culture, community, or founder magic. It is selling the idea that old software brands can be run with far fewer people than their previous owners believed. Frankly, that’s harsh. It’s also the reason the profit line changed so quickly.
AI has made that argument sharper. TechCrunch recently noted that the share of software changes generated or co-generated by Bending Spoons’ internal AI systems rose from less than 10% in 2025 to 90% in Q1 2026. Revenue per full-time employee more than doubled to $2.6 million. That figure tells you more than any pitch deck could. Ferrari’s company isn’t using AI as a sticker on the product box. It’s using AI as a replacement for payroll, process, and some of the human messiness that normally sits inside acquired software companies.
Public investors will also be buying into a tight governance structure. The four co-founders are expected to keep super-voting shares after the IPO, giving them five votes per share. That arrangement is familiar in technology listings, but familiarity doesn’t make it harmless. If you buy the stock, you’re mostly buying exposure to Ferrari’s judgment. You’re not buying much control over it.
The bet is bigger than one IPO
Bending Spoons is awkward for the market because it doesn’t fit the neat categories investors like. It isn’t Anthropic or Mistral, building a frontier model and asking you to believe in the future of AI itself. It also isn’t a sleepy private equity platform with a few SaaS assets tucked inside. It sits somewhere stranger: a software holding company using AI to make old brands cheaper to operate.
That distinction matters. If the IPO works, other buyers of mature software companies will treat Bending Spoons as permission. They’ll look at products with loyal users, bloated costs, and aging codebases, then ask whether the same surgery can be done again. Maybe it can. But you should be honest about what can break. Cut too far and the product gets worse. Raise prices too often and users leave. Keep the brand but remove the people who understand the product, and one day you may discover the brand was not the whole asset.
Vimeo is the test to watch. The $1.38 billion acquisition is recent enough that nobody can fairly declare victory. If Bending Spoons can keep the product useful after deep cuts, the company’s argument gets stronger. If Vimeo starts to feel hollow to creators and businesses that rely on it, investors will have a cleaner view of the cost behind those margins.
Fortune recently pointed out that Bending Spoons began with about $40,000 left over from Ferrari’s failed startup. A company that started with that sum is now trying to reach public markets at roughly $20 billion. That is a remarkable return, but it’s not a fairy tale. It is a very specific operating thesis: buy recognizable software, cut harder than the old owners could, let AI do more of the work, and trust that customers will tolerate the disruption.
If Nasdaq accepts that thesis in July, Bending Spoons will have done more than raise money. It will have given the software market a new model to copy, and a new reason for employees at aging tech brands to read acquisition announcements very carefully.
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