Bending Spoons raises $1.68B in Nasdaq IPO, stock surges 40%

Bending Spoons, the Milan-based tech conglomerate that owns AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, Meetup, Eventbrite and WeTransfer, went public on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on July 1, 2026, raising $1.68 billion and watching its shares close the day up nearly 40%.

The company priced its initial public offering at $29 per share, selling 57.9 million shares under the ticker BSP. Shares closed the first trading day at $40.50, a gain of 39.7%, pushing Bending Spoons' market capitalization past $25 billion — more than double its last private valuation of roughly $11 billion. As of July 5, the stock was trading at $35.93, still well above its offering price.

From Milan startup to Nasdaq roll-up machine

Founded in 2013 in Milan by Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello and Luca Querella, Bending Spoons built its business on a distinctive strategy: buying underperforming digital brands, stripping out costs through layoffs and price increases, and never selling. That playbook has produced one of the more unusual portfolios in consumer tech, spanning AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, Meetup, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, Issuu, Brightcove and the fitness-tracking app Komoot.

The approach has scaled. Bending Spoons reported $1.31 billion in revenue for 2025 and says its portfolio of apps reaches more than 500 million monthly active users combined. CEO Luca Ferrari has described the company as a hybrid between a private equity firm and a technology operator — acquiring distressed digital assets the way a buyout fund would, but running them as in-house tech products rather than flipping them.

Founders keep control after the listing

Despite selling a stake to public markets, Bending Spoons' four cofounders retain more than 80% of voting power through a dual-class share structure, a setup that mirrors how other founder-led tech companies have gone public while insulating management from shareholder pressure on strategy.

The IPO also included a notable structural detail: Bending Spoons issued tokenized shares alongside its traditional Nasdaq listing, a mechanism intended to bridge crypto infrastructure with conventional public equity markets. It's an early example of a major listed company treating tokenization as a parallel settlement rail rather than a niche experiment.

Why it matters

Bending Spoons' listing is one of the largest tech IPOs of 2026 and a rare instance of a European roll-up company — rather than a Silicon Valley startup — commanding a multibillion-dollar Nasdaq debut. Its business model, buying up legacy internet brands that larger companies had abandoned or neglected, is now being tested under public-market scrutiny, where investors will watch whether the cost-cutting playbook that revived AOL and Evernote can keep generating growth once quarterly earnings are public.

As first reported by Bloomberg and detailed further by TechCrunch, the offering signals continued investor appetite for tech IPOs in 2026 even for companies built on decades-old internet brands rather than new technology.