Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, debuted on Nasdaq above an 18 billion dollar valuation and jumped 40 percent in its first day of trading.
Bending Spoons, the Milan company that owns AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Eventbrite and WeTransfer, took its shares public on the Nasdaq, opening at a valuation above 18 billion dollars before the stock jumped 40 percent by the close of trading. The listing marks an unusual moment for a firm that built its business by buying up aging internet brands and trying to make them profitable again rather than flipping them for a quick return.
The 13 year old company has spent the past decade assembling a portfolio of once popular consumer names that had fallen out of favor. Its pitch to investors rests on the idea that these brands still carry recognition and loyal user bases, and that applying disciplined product work and data driven pricing can revive their revenue. Cofounder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli described the approach directly: the company wants to be known as an operator that takes beloved brands and makes them much better, rather than a firm that strips them down for parts.
What the Nasdaq Debut Signals About Investor Appetite
An opening valuation above 18 billion dollars followed by a 40 percent single day pop is the kind of reaction usually reserved for younger, faster growing tech names, not a holding company built around properties like Meetup and Eventbrite that many users assumed had faded from relevance. The size of the jump suggests investors are betting on the AI narrative Bending Spoons has attached to its older acquisitions, even though its underlying businesses look more like mature software operations than fresh startups.
The company's F 1 filing, the disclosure document foreign companies file instead of the standard S 1, includes a section titled AI before it was cool, a reference to the founders' earlier venture. Before Bending Spoons existed, its cofounders built a startup called Evertale that used what Danieli called machine learning at the time to automatically compile a diary of a user's life. That product failed, but the team says it shaped how they now think about reducing luck's role in building a company, a theme repeated throughout the filing with lines describing luck as central to early product market fit but irrelevant once a company pursues what it calls operational excellence.
Revenue Growth, AI Tools and the Layoff Controversy
Danieli told reporters that the past year and a half brought an acceleration in how quickly the company could ship new features and generate value for users, crediting AI tools for speeding up product development across its stable of brands. That claim lands at a moment when public and private investors are far more eager to fund anything tied to artificial intelligence than aging software as a service businesses, giving Bending Spoons a clear incentive to frame its history that way.
The company's growth has not come without friction. Its acquisitions have repeatedly drawn criticism over layoffs at the brands it absorbs, a pattern that has followed Bending Spoons through its purchases of Vimeo, WeTransfer and others. Executives argue the tradeoff has produced real revenue gains, pointing to internal data tracking, analytics infrastructure and experimentation tools they say let them price products and features with more precision than the original owners of these brands ever managed.
