AOL is public again — sort of. Its owner Bending spoonsthe 13-year-old Italian company that has been quietly acquiring beloved but troubled Internet brands for the past decade went public on the Nasdaq today, opening on worth over $18 billionwith the stock then plunging 40% by market close.
Based in Milan, Bending Spoons applied some of the private equity playbook to a large series of acquisitions – Meetup, Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer and many others. But it’s not a flip-and-sell plan: He wants to transform these companies with technology and then keep them.
“We want to position ourselves as an operator that takes beloved brands and makes them that much better,” its co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli told TechCrunch.
The “how” has caused controversy over the years, especially regarding layoffs. But the company also drove revenue growth, even more so with artificial intelligence. “Over the past year and a half, we’ve seen an incredible acceleration in the rate at which we’ve been able to deliver new features and create value for users,” Danieli told TechCrunch.
That may be just the thing when investors, public and private, have far more appetite for AI than aging SaaS businesses. But Bending Spoons has a case: Its F-1, the equivalent of S-1 forms for foreign companies, includes a chapter called “AI before it was cool” — a nod to its roots.
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 what we then called machine learning,” Danieli said. That startup failed, but it taught lessons to the co-founders and team members who now lead Bending Spoons — Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Luca Querella and Danieli.
“It started a reflection on the fact that you don’t always find a perfect correlation between how talented entrepreneurs are and the success they have, especially from zero to one. Luck is a very large component of that equation. So we developed an obsession with finding a strategy that would minimize the role of luck in growth and success as much as possible,” Danieli said.
The company also mentioned this philosophy in its own F-1 with words like, “Luck plays a big role in finding product-market fit” and “luck is irrelevant when pursuing operational excellence.”
These mantras appear in areas such as the pricing of its products. “We’re looking to leverage the sophisticated toolbox of data monitoring, analysis and experimentation that we’ve developed.”
According to Danieli, this sometimes leads the company to release more features for free to drive word of mouth. But it also led to price hikes that sparked complaints from long-term subscribers. Despite this, however, he says customer retention has been “remarkably solid”.
One takeover was particularly scrutinized. “Evernote might be the first product that we’ve had that was really loved by users, so we had very strict judges.” It’s what he’s most proud of — including being AI-heavy v11 modernize. He said the company eventually won over users with its changes that were praised by many subscribers, including Evernote co-founder Phil Libin.
Bending Spoons started getting more support over the years. It is valued at 11 billion dollars in a private equity round before its IPO, it had VCs and VIPs at its table, including big names from tech and entertainment. In her earlier years, however, VCs struggled to understand his approach. “We’ve had a lot of ‘you’re crazy’ reactions over the years,” Danieli recalls.
This is also captured by the company’s tagline, “Impossible. Maybe.”
Focusing on talent was also one of the lessons the Bending Spoons founders learned from their Evertale days, and recruiting became a focus. The Ferrari co-founder “invested the better part of the first two or three years working on the culture and hiring processes. We think we now excel at identifying talent, especially when they’re young and don’t yet have a good track record.”
The numbers seem to agree. According to the SEC filing, “helped in part by advances in artificial intelligence, revenue per full-time Spooner equivalent increased from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025 and was $0.97 million in the first quarter of 2026.”
This also explains why Bending Spoons made the unusual decision to bring the entire company to New York to celebrate its introduction. “It’s another tool to access the liquidity we need to fuel our acquisition strategy, but we also thought that for one day it would be the right thing to take it all and enjoy the moment with all our colleagues,” Danieli said.
It’s only one day, though. After that, Bending Spoons will return to corporate markets — and benefit from the depressed SaaS valuations it has managed to escape, according to Danieli. “From an acquirer’s perspective and as a company growing through acquisitions, this is actually a great opportunity and time for capital growth.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
