Bending Spoons, Owner of Internet Brands, Soars in Nasdaq IPO

Bending Spoons BSP, which owns well-known businesses like AOL and Vimeo, debuted on the Nasdaq on Wednesday and closed the day at $40.50, a 39.7% gain over its IPO price.

The Italian company’s playbook has been to snap up established yet sluggish internet businesses that maintain healthy market footprints and active users and take a PE-style approach of investment and cost-cutting to return them to profitability. “They shrink the teams, but they also write code, they upend the back-end systems, they upgrade features, they work on pricing,” explains Sriram Krishnan of VC firm Kearny Jackson, who invested in Bending Spoons in 2022. “It takes a lot of expertise to pull something like this off. So, in a way, PE firms won’t be able to do what Bending Spoons is doing.”

The company priced its IPO at $29 per share, giving it a valuation of about $18 billion, and it opened trading at $31 a share. Its IPO raked in $1.68 billion in total, with $683.6 million in proceeds (nearly 41%) going to existing shareholders who sold stock in the offering.

Bending Spoons’ top investors before the listing included Italian investment firm Galileo Quattordici (which owned 11.6% of the company), Baillie Gifford (15%), and Cox Investment Holdings (9.3%).

The company’s revenue has been soaring: $1.31 billion in 2025, up from $671.1 million in 2024 and $387.1 million in 2023, according to its financial disclosures. Bending Spoons said in its IPO filings that it had 500 million monthly active users as of March 2026, up from 111 million in December 2023. During that time, it grew its paying customer base from 3 million to 9 million.

Last year, the firm acquired Eventbrite, AOL, and Vimeo in quick succession. Most recently, it added the GPS pet-tracking startup Tractive. Its other main active businesses include Brightcove, Evernote, Harvest, Komoot, Remini, StreamYard, and WeTransfer.

Bending Spoons’ acquisition strategy has been pricey, even as it seeks out steeply discounted deals. The company reported a net loss of $112 million last year, following net income of $89 million in 2024.