Owner of Eventbrite and Vimeo celebrates 40% price jump on debut

In the ritual theatre of the Nasdaq MarketSite, where founders pose for photographs beside the ticker and investors try to read a company’s future in the first minutes of trading, Bending Spoons’ arrival looked like another well-rehearsed technology flotation. Yet the market’s reaction suggested something more complicated: a business that does not fit neatly into either the venture-backed software playbook or the familiar private equity handbook, and which has persuaded public investors to back its thesis at scale.

Shares in the Milan-based group rose by almost 40 per cent on their first day of trading, a move that took them from an initial public offering price of $29 to a closing price of $40.5. The float raised $1.68 billion and valued the company at about $18 billion at listing, before the first day’s jump pushed the market capitalisation to close to $26 billion. For a European technology company, it stands out as one of the year’s largest debuts, and as a rare case of a continentally rooted digital business commanding a Wall Street-style reception.

That enthusiasm comes with a question attached. Bending Spoons is not being sold as the next great consumer platform or enterprise software champion, built primarily by expanding the user base and pouring cash into growth. Its proposition is more austere and, to some, more believable: buy familiar but underperforming digital businesses, cut them into a shape that produces cash, and then keep buying. It is a compounding machine by design, and the investment case hinges on whether such compounding can endure once it is exposed to public scrutiny and the temptations of the stock market clock.

The company has made a name for itself by accumulating brands that have drifted from their peak. Vimeo, the video platform once positioned as an artful alternative to YouTube. Eventbrite, the ticketing group that grew up with the explosion of independent events. Komoot, a mapping and route planning app beloved by cyclists and hikers. AOL, a name that still carries a certain cultural weight despite its long retreat from the front line of the internet. Bending Spoons says it owns more than 50 companies, a portfolio large enough to resemble a holding company, but tightly enough managed to be marketed as a single operating system for corporate turnarounds.

It describes its method in language that is unusually explicit for a public prospectus. The strategy, set out in its listing documents, is to acquire digital businesses, implement deep transformations and ongoing optimisations to expand earnings sustainably, and reinvest those earnings into more acquisitions. That is presented not as opportunism but as a cycle, one that gains speed as the portfolio grows and as the group’s playbook is applied across more targets.

To critics, that can sound like a euphemism for stripping businesses down. Bending Spoons does not deny that staff reductions are central to its approach. Luca Ferrari, its co-founder and chief executive, has previously described the process as radical and time-consuming, which is an unusually candid way of signalling that the group is willing to make changes that incumbents avoid. The prospectus is even starker. Through the acquisitions of AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo, Bending Spoons said it added 1,830 full-time equivalent team members. By the end of this year, it expects only a few hundred of those roles to remain.

There are two ways to interpret such numbers. One is as a warning about the human cost of “efficiency” when applied to creative and community-led internet businesses. The other is as a judgement on how bloated some of these companies had become, particularly after years in which cheap capital subsidised large payrolls in the name of growth that never quite arrived. Investors do not need to take a moral position to see the arithmetic. Cutting costs quickly can transform a weak revenue line into a credible profit, and credibility is a tradable asset in markets that have grown impatient with loss-making technology stories.

Bending Spoons’ emphasis is not merely on expenses. It also focuses on changing how its companies make money, and it has been forthright about preferring to monetise existing users rather than chase new ones. Subscriptions have become the centre of gravity. In the first quarter of this year, 84 per cent of revenue came from subscriptions, a figure that signals both recurring income and a deliberate pivot away from more volatile advertising or transaction-driven models. The company also speaks of substantial changes to code and user interfaces, a reminder that its restructuring is not, at least in its telling, purely financial engineering.

The scale of the customer base is part of the sales pitch. At the end of March, Bending Spoons said it had 500 million monthly active users, up from 111 million in December 2023. Over the same period, paying customers rose from 3 million to 9 million. Those are the sort of numbers that can flatter a prospectus, but they also help explain why subscription pricing and design choices matter so much: a small increase in conversion rates, or a slight rise in monthly fees, becomes meaningful when applied across millions of people.

Financial results have been used to argue that the machine is already working. In the first quarter of 2026, revenue was $601 million, up 132 per cent from $259 million a year earlier. Net profit was $27.5 million, compared with a loss of $112.2 million in the first quarter of 2025. Across 2025 as a whole, the company reported a net loss of $204,000, close enough to break-even to be presented as a turning point. Public market investors, chastened by the last cycle of technology listings, have become less forgiving of vague promises. Bending Spoons is offering something that looks like proof.

Proof, however, is rarely final in a business that relies on acquisitions. The group has been active, completing six deals last year and five the year before. This year it has bought Eventbrite and Tractive, an Austrian company specialising in GPS tracking for pets. Such frequency suggests an organisation built to ingest new assets, but it also raises questions about integration, distraction, and the availability of suitable targets. Bending Spoons says it has identified more than 1,000 digital businesses that could be attractive acquisition targets across public and private markets, an assertion that is both a promise of pipeline and an admission that the model needs fresh material.

The financing of that pipeline matters. Bending Spoons has accumulated roughly $4.4 billion in debt to fund acquisitions. Debt can be a sharp instrument in a rising-rate world. If earnings remain resilient and cash flows predictable, leverage can accelerate returns. If the cycle turns, it can quickly narrow strategic options, forcing a company to sell assets, cut deeper, or retreat from its ambitions. Public shareholders buying into the compounding story are also, indirectly, buying into the company’s ability to manage the balance sheet through whatever the next few years bring.

That is why the first day’s share jump is as much about narrative as it is about demand. Investors appear to be rewarding the claim that Bending Spoons is not merely collecting tired internet brands, but operating a disciplined system that can extract value from them repeatedly. The comparison some will reach for is private equity, with its emphasis on buying, cutting, and optimising. Yet Bending Spoons argues that it is different. It does not position itself as a fund with a timetable to sell. It presents itself as a long-term owner, closer in spirit to a conglomerate, and it implies that enduring ownership gives it incentive to invest in products rather than simply harvest them.

Whether that distinction holds in practice will be tested by the public market’s own timetable. Shareholders, even patient ones, will judge results quarter by quarter. If the company over-monetises a service, it risks eroding the very user trust on which subscription income depends. If it cuts too deeply, it may find it harder to improve products, retain talent, or innovate beyond incremental tweaks. If it under-monetises, the numbers that supported the IPO valuation become harder to defend. Bending Spoons must persuade the market that it can walk that line across dozens of disparate products.

Governance adds another twist. The four founders, Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli and Luca Querella, will retain 82.71 per cent of the voting power. Each has a net worth of more than $2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Such concentrated control can be a shield against short-termism, allowing management to keep executing its strategy without being bounced by activist investors or mood swings. It can also be a source of tension if public shareholders decide that the founders’ priorities diverge from their own. In the language of modern listings, the company is offering investors economic exposure without full voice.

Early backers have been rewarded. Two London-listed Baillie Gifford trusts were among those who provided early support, continuing a pattern of the Edinburgh-based investment firm identifying private market winners. Schiehallion Fund invested $42 million between August 2023 and this March, and the holding was valued at $385.5 million when the company filed IPO terms on 22 June. That stake accounted for 16.7 per cent of Schiehallion’s portfolio, a concentration that speaks to conviction and to the trust’s willingness to carry illiquid bets until a public market exit arrives. Baillie Gifford European Growth Trust invested £4.4 million between August 2023 and February 2024, and its holding was valued at £53.2 million, or 13.4 per cent of total assets.

Analysts and the company’s supporters have been quick to frame the listing as another validation of Baillie Gifford’s stock-picking in private markets. Alex Trett, an equity research analyst at Winterflood, described the IPO as a success story highlighting the firm’s ability to identify compelling private opportunities. James Budden, Baillie Gifford’s global head of marketing, argued that Bending Spoons challenges conventional categories and represents a new model for transforming digital applications, improving underlying products and running them more efficiently. Those endorsements are not incidental: they lend institutional ballast to a company whose model, bluntly described, involves making internet services more profitable by charging more and spending less.

Behind the finance, Bending Spoons has always traded on a kind of intellectual theatre. The name is drawn from a scene in The Matrix and is intended to evoke “the power of the mind” and the ambition of attempting the seemingly impossible. In the context of an IPO, that mythology can sound like branding garnish. Yet it also hints at what the founders are selling to the market: the idea that there is a repeatable, almost contrarian craft to rescuing digital businesses that others have given up on, and that this craft can be scaled without losing its potency.

That is a bold claim in a sector littered with roll-ups that promised synergy and delivered complexity. The internet has produced many beloved products that struggled to convert affection into profit. The easy explanation is that their founders were idealists who did not like charging people. The harsher explanation is that some services simply do not have an economic model that can support large organisations once growth slows. Bending Spoons is betting that many of these businesses were not doomed, merely mismanaged, and that discipline applied after the fact can make them lucrative.

If the market is right, the company could become a template for a new kind of European technology champion: not an inventor of the next platform, but a consolidator that treats software products as durable assets, to be maintained, refined and priced rationally. If the market is wrong, it may discover that there are limits to how far efficiency and subscriptions can carry a portfolio of ageing brands, especially as competitors emerge and consumers become more willing to cancel than endure a deteriorating experience.

For now, the first day’s surge gives Ferrari and his co-founders momentum, a richer acquisition currency and, perhaps, the chance to present their model as something more than a cold-eyed exercise. The Nasdaq debut has made Bending Spoons a public experiment in whether the late internet’s backlog of neglected products can be turned into a stable, compounding business, and whether the gains can be achieved without hollowing out the very companies that give the group its name and its scale.