Bending Spoons IPO: $18B valuation, 40% first-day pop

Key Takeaways

• Bending Spoons opened at $18B valuation on Nasdaq, with shares jumping 40% by market close
• The company's strategy: acquire distressed tech brands (Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer) and optimize them with AI and operational rigor
• Revenue per employee more than doubled from $1.12M (2023) to $2.57M (2025), driven partly by AI tooling

AOL is public again, in a sense. Bending Spoons, the Milan-based company that has spent the past decade buying struggling internet brands, debuted on Nasdaq today at an $18 billion valuation. Shares popped 40% by close. The 13-year-old firm owns Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Meetup, Eventbrite, and a string of other names that once defined the consumer internet.

The listing marks a rare European tech IPO at this scale, and an even rarer outcome for a company built almost entirely through acquisition rather than organic product development.

What is Bending Spoons actually doing with these brands?

The playbook borrows from private equity but diverges at a critical point: Bending Spoons holds rather than flips. "We want to place ourselves as an operator that takes beloved brands and makes them much better," cofounder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli told TechCrunch.

"Making them better" has meant layoffs, which drew criticism. It has also meant aggressive AI integration. Danieli said AI accelerated shipping new features in the past 18 months. The company's SEC filing includes a chapter titled "AI before it was cool," referencing a failed predecessor startup called Evertale that used machine learning to auto-generate life diaries.

Evertale flopped, but the experience shaped the team's philosophy. "You don't always find perfect correlation between how talented entrepreneurs are and the success they have, especially from zero to one," Danieli said. "Luck is a very big component of that equation. So we developed an obsession for finding a strategy that would, as much as possible, reduce the role that luck plays."

How does the "minimize luck" philosophy work in practice?

Two principles show up repeatedly in Bending Spoons' filings and public statements. First: "Luck plays a big role in finding product-market fit." Second: "Luck is irrelevant when pursuing operational excellence." The company sidesteps the first problem by buying products that already have market fit, then attacks the second problem with data infrastructure and pricing experiments.

Danieli described their approach to monetization: "We try to leverage the sophisticated data tracking, analytics infrastructure and experimentation toolkit that we've developed." Sometimes that means releasing more free features to drive word of mouth. Sometimes it means price hikes that anger longtime subscribers.

Despite complaints about pricing changes, Danieli says customer retention has been "remarkably stable."

The Evernote test

Evernote, acquired in 2022, was the company's highest-profile and most scrutinized deal. The note-taking app had a passionate user base and a decade of product baggage. "Evernote may be the first product we acquired that was genuinely loved by users, so we had very strict judges," Danieli said.

He pointed to the AI-heavy v11 update as evidence the strategy works. Even Evernote cofounder Phil Libin praised the changes. Whether that endorsement translates to revenue growth remains a question the company will now have to answer quarterly.

The numbers behind the valuation

Bending Spoons was valued at $11 billion in its pre-IPO private equity round, with both VC firms and celebrity investors on the cap table. The Nasdaq debut pushed that to $18 billion, before the 40% first-day jump.

The company's SEC filing reveals a striking productivity metric: revenue per full-time employee jumped from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, hitting $0.97 million in Q1 2026 alone. Bending Spoons credits AI tooling for part of that acceleration.

For context, the company took its entire workforce to New York for the listing. "It's one more tool for us to access the liquidity that we need to fuel our acquisitive strategy," Danieli said. One day of celebration, then back to buying.

What comes next?

Danieli was direct about the opportunity he sees: SaaS valuations have crashed, and Bending Spoons escaped that compression by going public at a premium. "From a buyer's perspective and as a company that grows through acquisitions, that's..." The quote trailed off in the TechCrunch interview, but the implication is clear. Distressed tech assets are cheap. Bending Spoons has fresh public-market currency to buy them.

The company's approach still puzzles some investors. Danieli recalled years of skepticism: "We've got a lot of 'you're crazy' reactions." The company's tagline captures the mindset: "Impossible. Maybe."

Frequently Asked Questions

What companies does Bending Spoons own?

Bending Spoons has acquired Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Meetup, Eventbrite, and several other consumer internet brands over the past decade.

Where is Bending Spoons headquartered?

The company is headquartered in Milan, Italy, though it listed on the Nasdaq in New York.

How did Bending Spoons increase revenue per employee?

The company credits AI tooling, operational efficiency improvements, and aggressive experimentation with pricing and features. Revenue per employee rose from $1.12M in 2023 to $2.57M in 2025.

Why did Bending Spoons go public?

According to cofounder Matteo Danieli, the IPO provides liquidity to continue their acquisition strategy, giving them public-market currency to buy more distressed tech brands.

Source: Venture Capital News | TechCrunch / Anna Heim