The Italian Startup That Bought AOL, Evernote and Vimeo Just Hit Wall Street

From a Failed Journaling App to a $25 Billion Empire

Thirteen years ago, four friends who had studied together in Italy and Denmark tried to build a digital journaling app. It flopped. Most people would have walked away. Instead, Luca Ferrari and his co-founders regrouped, rethought everything, and quietly built one of the most unusual companies in the world. AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite — all darlings of a previous era of technology, and now all owned by the same little-known Italian startup called Bending Spoons, which has acquired more than 50 stalled-out apps and websites and rolled them into a single business that raked in $1.3 billion in 2025.

The Milan-based tech holding company debuted on Nasdaq on July 1 under the ticker BSP, with shares surging nearly 40% on their first day of trading to close at $40.50. The stock priced at $29 per share, above the anticipated range of $26 to $28, raising approximately $1.68 billion in total, with roughly $953.9 million going directly to the company. It was, by any measure, a stunning debut — and a validation of a business model that plenty of investors once dismissed as crazy.

The Playbook: Buy the Unloved, Then Squeeze Out the Value

The most apt way to describe Bending Spoons is as a traditional tech software company crossed with a private equity firm. Like a private equity firm, it buys up struggling companies — in its case, all software companies — in hopes of making them more profitable. But unlike typical private equity, Bending Spoons is not a flip-and-sell scheme: it wants to transform these companies with technology and then hold on to them. CEO Ferrari has called it "the best of both worlds of Berkshire Hathaway and a technology company."

Bending Spoons buys apps that bring in solid revenue but aren't growing like they used to. Then Ferrari's team reboots the underlying technology — centralizing server costs, cleaning up sprawling codebases — while slashing costs. That often means layoffs: according to its SEC filings, the firm paid over $78.6 million in "reorganization-related expenses" in 2025 after picking up 1,830 staff from its AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo deals. The cost-cutting extends to users, too. A Bending Spoons takeover tends to mean stinging price rises: Evernote users used to pay $100 per year for the note-taking app, but after Bending Spoons bought the company for $200 million in 2023, it raised prices to $249, with business users taking an even bigger hit.

The Numbers That Won Over Wall Street

According to its SEC filing, the company reported $601 million in revenue for Q1 2026, generating $27.4 million in net income — a dramatic turnaround from the same period the previous year, when Bending Spoons reported a $112 million net loss on $259 million in revenue. The pivot to profitability came despite acquiring additional brands and investing heavily in AI-powered features. As of March 2026, the company has over 500 million monthly active users across its portfolio, with more than 9 million monthly paying subscribers.

Much of the company's revenue is anchored by AOL, which it bought for $1.45 billion in 2025 and which now accounts for roughly half of total revenue. In part helped by progress in AI, revenue per full-time equivalent employee increased from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025. That kind of efficiency is what made investors look past the company's unconventional structure and bet big on its future.

What Comes Next for the Brand Collector

Bending Spoons' rise also highlights Europe's growing influence in global technology. While many of the world's largest software companies are based in the United States, Bending Spoons has demonstrated that European firms can also build globally competitive technology businesses through innovative business models. The successful debut stands in stark contrast to the broader SaaS market climate, which has seen investor confidence shaken by concerns that artificial intelligence could eventually displace traditional software businesses.

Rather than running from that disruption, Bending Spoons is leaning into it. After the IPO, Bending Spoons plans to go back to buying companies — and take advantage of slashed SaaS valuations it has itself managed to escape. "From a buyer's perspective and as a company that grows through acquisitions, that's actually a great opportunity and moment to deploy capital," said co-founder Matteo Danieli. For a company that turned a failed journal app into a $25 billion empire, that kind of confidence seems more than earned.