From Milan to Nasdaq: A $18 Billion Milestone
AOL is public again — sort of. Its owner, Bending Spoons, the 13-year-old Italian company that has been quietly acquiring beloved but ailing internet brands for the past decade, went public on the Nasdaq in early 2026. It opened at an over $18 billion valuation, with shares surging 40% by market close.
A Different Kind of Acquirer
Headquartered in Milan, Bending Spoons has applied elements of the private equity playbook to a long series of acquisitions — Meetup, Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and many others. However, it is not a flip-and-sell operation. The company aims to transform these brands with technology and then hold onto them for the long term.
“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.
AI at the Core — and a Controversial Path
The ‘how’ has generated controversy, especially around layoffs. But the company has also driven revenue growth, increasingly powered by artificial intelligence. “In the past year and a half, we’ve witnessed an incredible acceleration in the pace at which we were able to ship new features and create value for users,” Danieli said.
That message resonates in an era where investors, both public and private, show far more appetite for AI than for legacy SaaS businesses. Bending Spoons’ F-1 filing (the non-U.S. equivalent of an S-1) even includes a chapter titled “AI before it was cool” — an acknowledgment of its deep-rooted focus.
Learning from Failure: The Birth of a Philosophy
Before Bending Spoons, there was Evertale, “a product that would automatically create a diary of your life by leveraging what you would call AI today, and that we called machine learning then,” Danieli recalled. That startup failed, but it taught lasting lessons to the cofounders now leading Bending Spoons — Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Luca Querella, and Danieli.
“It sparked a reflection around the fact that you don’t always find perfect correlation between how talented entrepreneurs are and the success they have, especially from zero to one. 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 in growth and success,” Danieli said.
Operational Excellence Over Luck
This philosophy made it into the company’s F-1, with lines such as, “Luck plays a big role in finding product-market fit,” and “luck is irrelevant when pursuing operational excellence.”
Those mantras guide areas like pricing. “We try to leverage the sophisticated data tracking, analytics infrastructure and experimentation toolkit that we’ve developed,” Danieli explained. This approach sometimes leads the company to release more features for free to drive word of mouth. It has also led to price increases that sparked complaints from long-term subscribers. Yet Danieli says customer retention has been “remarkably stable.”
In an environment where luck is often celebrated, Bending Spoons offers a contrasting blueprint: build systems, minimize randomness, and execute with precision.
via TechCrunch