Buy, fix, keep: Bending Spoons takes its acquisition machine public

Bending Spoons has turned the acquisition of struggling internet businesses into an industrial process, buying established but underperforming digital brands, stripping out costs, rebuilding their technology and raising prices, then holding them for the earnings rather than reselling. This week the Milan-based conglomerate took that machine public, floating on New York's Nasdaq and raising $1.68 billion in one of the largest listings by a European company in recent years.

The strategy has produced a portfolio of familiar names, among them AOL, Evernote, Vimeo and Eventbrite, assembled through around 50 acquisitions and frequently funded with debt. It has also produced rapid growth: revenue roughly doubled last year to $1.31 billion, and the flotation valued the business at $18.4 billion, turning its four co-founders into billionaires.

The shares priced at $29 on 1 July, above the marketed range of $26 to $28, then rose around 40 per cent on their trading debut to close at $40.50. By the end of the week the stock was trading roughly 24 per cent above the offer price, giving Bending Spoons a market capitalisation of just under $23 billion and delivering gains for backers including Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, Durable Capital Partners and Fidelity.

What drew investors was less the roster of consumer brands than the model itself. Chief Executive Luca Ferrari has described the approach as combining "the best of both worlds of Berkshire Hathaway and a technology company." The distinction from private equity is central to the pitch: where buyout firms acquire, improve and sell, Bending Spoons says it does not intend to exit its holdings, seeking returns from earnings alone.

"Our way to generate value is to buy companies where there's a core of greatness, whether it's a brand, a customer base, maybe some good aspects of the products or some good aspects of the team, then rebuilding everything else to make it much, much better," Ferrari said.

The business traces back to 2013, when Ferrari and two fellow engineering graduates he had met while studying in Copenhagen, Matteo Danieli and Francesco Patarnello, wound up an earlier venture. That start-up, a diary app called Evertale conceived while the founders were backpacking in Indonesia, had raised $1 million but folded within three years, a failure Ferrari has called "liberating." Taking two former colleagues, Tomasz Greber and Luca Querella, and the remaining $40,000, the group founded Bending Spoons and spent the following decade quietly acquiring mobile apps. The name was suggested by Danieli after a late-night viewing of The Matrix.

The scale of what followed is set out in the listing documents. Behind the headline revenue of $1.31 billion for 2025 sat operating income of $278 million and organic growth of 13 per cent, with the bulk of the year's increase coming from acquisitions rather than existing operations. The group recorded a net result close to break-even after $143 million of interest costs and reorganisation charges. In the first quarter of 2026 revenue reached $601 million, up 132 per cent year on year, with net income of $27.4 million. Subscriptions account for the large majority of sales.

Its user base has expanded sharply over the same period, from 111 million monthly active users at the end of 2023 to more than 500 million by March 2026, while paying customers rose from 3 million to 9 million.



The pace of dealmaking has accelerated. More than three quarters of Bending Spoons' acquisitions have been struck in the past three years, and the company deployed over $2 billion of acquisition capital in the first quarter of 2026 alone, against $194 million across the whole of 2023. Recent purchases include note-taking app Evernote in 2023 for around $200 million, file-sharing service WeTransfer in 2024, events platform Eventbrite in December 2025 for about $500 million, video company Vimeo in January 2026, and AOL, acquired last year for roughly $1.45 billion and now said to generate around half of group revenue.

The methods have drawn criticism. Integrations have typically involved substantial job losses, with around 1,830 staff removed following recent deals, alongside price rises and the withdrawal of features. The Evernote acquisition, which Ferrari nonetheless singles out as the company's standout deal, prompted controversy when the new owners cut hundreds of roles, including the entire US workforce. Ferrari said new registrations had since risen after years of decline and that Evernote now has one of the highest paying-customer retention rates in the portfolio. "Evernote today is, literally, almost like an entirely new business," he said, pointing to rebuilt technology and an expanded feature set.

Not all of those affected have been critical. Joe Hyrkin, former chief executive of publishing platform Issuu, which Bending Spoons bought in 2024, said the new owners had treated departing staff fairly and improved the product. "There were lay-offs, but everyone got a good severance, everyone was treated fairly," he said, adding that the company had implemented changes drawn from Issuu's own roadmap.

Central to the model is a workforce Bending Spoons calls "Spooners," about 700 employees hired to replace departing staff and run the acquired businesses. The company says fewer than 300 were recruited last year from around 800,000 applicants, and that it pays well to attract graduates who might otherwise join hedge funds. Revenue per employee reached $2.57 million in 2025 and $1 million in the first quarter of 2026. Florinda Pannofino, 29, who joined as an intern and now leads both Evernote and portfolio company Harvest, said: "If you want to work hard and roll up your sleeves, no matter how long you've been in the company, how old you are, you're welcome."

For investors, the risks sit alongside the returns. The rapid acquisition programme has left Bending Spoons highly leveraged, with debt of about $4.4 billion, and the concentration of deals in a short period leaves limited visibility on how the enlarged group will perform over the longer term. The company has historically disclosed little financial detail on its individual businesses, a stance that some lenders cited when declining to extend loans, according to people familiar with the matter. Ferrari acknowledged that this had helped drive the decision to list. "Lenders much prefer lending to public companies, especially companies trading in the US, because they're more strictly regulated," he said.

Ferrari said the company had identified more than 1,000 potential targets at any given time, representing around $400 billion of aggregate annual revenue, and indicated Bending Spoons may now make greater use of its shares to fund deals following the listing, having previously resisted dilution. Companies in artificial intelligence are unlikely to feature, he said, because most are newly founded and already innovating, leaving Bending Spoons with less to add; the focus would remain on businesses that were not "already winning."

Ferrari accepted that reliance on a small cohort of highly motivated employees to push through transformations could act as a brake on the group's ambitions, but said he expected its acquisitive growth to continue. The listing ranks among the largest by a European company since 2023 and returns AOL, one of the internet's earliest mass-market brands, to public markets under new ownership.

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