Amid the global frenzy caused by SpaceX's IPO, another initial public offering in the United States has caught the market's attention. The Italian technology company Bending Spoons intends to raise up to US$1.6 billion in its initial public offering, aiming for a valuation of US$19 billion.
The central point of this attention lies precisely in the market in which Bending Spoons operates. The European company acquires existing SaaS businesses and rebuilds the products. In practice, it generates revenue from buying "relics" from the internet.
Since its founding in 2013, Bending Spoons has acquired more than 50 companies. These include the video platform Vimeo, the file-sharing service WeTransfer, the ticketing company Eventbrite, and the once-popular internet brand AOL.
Currently, Bending Spoons has a broad list of potential acquisitions. Traditional software company stocks have suffered a sharp decline in value due to investor fears that artificial intelligence will transform the sector, and many venture capital funds have shifted their investments to AI.
This has left a generation of startups and technology companies created before the artificial intelligence boom with fewer alternatives. In its IPO prospectus, the Italian company stated that it has a list of over a thousand potential acquisitions.
“These aren’t undead companies,” Joe Hyrkin, who sold his company, the digital publishing platform Issuu, to Bending Spoons in 2024, told The New York Times . According to him, these companies simply stopped attracting the interest of venture capital investors.
According to Kerry Trainor, founder of Creator Partners, an investment firm that invested in Bending Spoons in 2022, many well-known brands, even from the digital age, maintain a much deeper connection with their audience than many realize.
Some will be replaced by artificial intelligence, he noted, but many others will simply be able to adapt. "Markets often overreact in believing that everything will be replaced," he stated.
In 2024, Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari stated that his company promotes drastic changes in the companies it acquires, with the goal of improving them. "If someone wants nothing to change, we're not a good buyer," he said at the time.
Bending Spoons originated from a digital diary app created by Ferrari and some engineer friends. The app, called Evertale, was unsuccessful.
The group decided to use their remaining funds and engineering skills to improve digital products that already had a user base. They purchased a virtual keyboard application for $10,000 and used the profits to fund new acquisitions.
The holding company was named Bending Spoons, in reference to the idea of bending spoons with the mind, a concept popularized by a scene from the movie Matrix .
Over time, the acquisitions grew in size, leading the company to raise capital from investors and take on debt to continue expanding its portfolio.
In 2022, Bending Spoons acquired the Evernote app. Founded in 2004, Evernote was one of the first app companies to gain prominence with the popularization of smartphones.
Over time, however, the company's growth slowed and it went through several failed attempts at recovery. The acquisition of Evernote by Bending Spoons caught the attention of the technology industry.
Last October, the company bought the AOL portal. Although the figures were not disclosed, the market valued the purchase at US$1.5 billion.
The deal was finalized with the private equity giant Apollo and marked another important step in the expansion of the Italian company. To finance the transaction, it announced a funding round of US$2.8 billion.
The website was the primary internet destination for millions of Americans during the initial dot-com bubble, and it is still used by over 30 million people every month.
In his Dealflowbr newsletter, Guilherme Lima of Astella says that the company's IPO is shaping up to be one of the most interesting in recent times, in terms of venture capital firms.
"You don't control the timing, the market's taste, or the cultural moment. But running a digital business well requires skill, and skill becomes a process," he wrote.
"So, instead of betting on finding the next product-market fit (PMF), they buy products that already work in some way and make them work better, with greater scale," he adds.
Last year, Bending Spoons achieved revenue of US$1.3 billion. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the company recorded US$601 million.
