Bending Spoons is taking AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and Eventbrite back to Wall Street inside one Milan-based software roll-up. The deal is current, but the published version overstated the pricing because public reports still showed the IPO marketed at $26 to $28 a share.
Bending Spoons is not arriving on Nasdaq with a clean Silicon Valley growth story. It is bringing a stranger one: buy internet brands people still recognize, cut hard, rebuild the software stack, and see whether nostalgia plus subscription discipline can produce a public company worth close to $19 billion.
According to Barron's, the company is expected to list Wednesday under the ticker BSP and is seeking to raise nearly $1.6 billion by selling 58 million shares at $26 to $28 each. Axios reported earlier this month that Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Allen and Company are lead bookrunners. That is enough to make the IPO current. It is not enough to say the shares have already priced above the range, because the public reports available on June 30 still described the range, not a final above-range price.
That distinction matters. If you're buying this story, you're not just buying a software company. You're buying Luca Ferrari's argument that old consumer internet assets still have more life in them than their previous owners could extract. AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, Brightcove, Meetup, Komoot, Harvest, MileIQ, you name it, Bending Spoons has been collecting the kind of brands that most investors had already filed away as yesterday's internet.
The numbers are real enough to deserve attention. Barron's, citing the company's SEC filing, said Bending Spoons generated $2.6 billion in 2025 revenue on a pro forma basis including AOL and other recently acquired businesses, but only $22.4 million in net profit. In Q1 2026, it reported $601.3 million in revenue and $27.5 million in net profit. It also carries about $4.4 billion in long-term debt. That is not a small footnote. Debt is part of the model.
Ferrari calls Bending Spoons a software compounder. The plain version is simpler. The company buys products with large existing user bases, moves the work inside its own operating system, cuts staff, and pushes harder on paid subscriptions. Evernote was acquired in early 2023. WeTransfer followed in 2024, and TechCrunch reported that Bending Spoons planned to lay off 75% of its staff after the deal. Vimeo agreed to a $1.38 billion sale in 2025, then reports in January 2026 described layoffs hitting most of the company, including the video team.
Frankly, this is the part investors should look at without blinking. Cost discipline can be smart. It can also look brilliant for a few quarters because the easiest dollars are the ones you stop spending. The harder test comes later, when the staff is already smaller, the free users most likely to convert have been pushed, and the business has to grow because the product is better, not because the expense line got thinner.
AOL Is The Perfect Test Case
The AOL detail sounds almost too neat, but it carries the whole story. Barron's noted that AOL is returning to public markets through Bending Spoons after the Italian company bought it in January 2026. This is the same brand that once defined dial-up internet and then became shorthand for the Time Warner merger disaster. Now it sits inside a Milan company founded in 2013 with $40,000 and five employees, according to the filing details cited by Barron's.
You can laugh at that, but you shouldn't dismiss it. Old brands can still have paying users, search traffic, email habits, archives, accounts, and muscle memory. Bending Spoons is betting that those assets were not worthless, just badly run or underinvested. The Financial Times recently described the company as buying damaged internet businesses, rebuilding them, and aiming for at least 25% annualized returns on capital from earnings rather than resale. That is closer to permanent-capital private equity than to a normal app company.
The risk is that public markets may price the AI part as magic when it is really just operating leverage with better tools. The company has said its systems help rewrite code, automate support, detect bugs, and tag data. Good. You want that if you're running a portfolio of aging software products. But AI does not make debt disappear, and it does not guarantee that Evernote, AOL, or Vimeo can win back younger users who have already moved their work and habits elsewhere.
At a valuation near $19 billion, investors are being asked to believe the playbook can repeat across a long list of acquired brands. One or two turnarounds can be operational skill. A dozen requires a machine that keeps working after the obvious cuts are gone.
That is the real IPO question. Bending Spoons has already shown it can buy recognizable names and make them leaner. Public shareholders now have to find out whether it can make them meaningfully better.
Also read: Schneider Electric pays $3.1 billion for Cognite and bets the industrial AI race is won at the data layer • X launches an official MCP server and every social platform will need to follow • Anthropic's refusal to bend to Washington has cost it Pentagon contracts and earned it a court fight it did not expect
