Bending Spoons lists on Nasdaq at over $18 billion

Bending Spoons debuted on Nasdaq with an opening valuation of over $18 billion, and its shares were up about 40% by the market close on its IPO day, TechCrunch reported. The 13-year-old Italian company, headquartered in Milan, has built a business around acquiring established consumer internet products—such as Meetup, Eventbrite, Vimeo, and WeTransfer—and then running them for cash rather than flipping them.

In its public filing, the company tried to demystify that model. The document includes a section titled “AI before it was cool,” and the firm credits recent revenue growth in part to AI-enabled changes that increased the pace of shipping features and extracting more value from existing user bases. Bending Spoons also describes an internal operating system of analytics, experimentation, and pricing tests—sometimes releasing features for free to drive word of mouth, sometimes raising prices despite predictable backlash, while watching retention.

The company’s executives frame the strategy as reducing dependence on luck. Matteo Danieli, the cofounder and chief product officer, told TechCrunch the goal is operational excellence after product-market fit is already proven—an approach that fits a portfolio of mature apps where the main variable is execution rather than invention. That emphasis also helps explain why the firm has attracted controversy: acquisitions have been followed by layoffs, a pattern that can look like “turnaround” from an investor deck and like “hollowing out” from inside a product community.

Bending Spoons’ most scrutinised purchase, according to TechCrunch, was Evernote—its first acquisition of a product with a deeply attached user base. The company released an AI-heavy update and drew both complaints from long-term subscribers and praise from Evernote cofounder Phil Libin. The filing also recounts the founders’ earlier failed startup, Evertale, which attempted to build an automatic life diary using machine learning—useful as a reminder that the current playbook was assembled after at least one attempt that did not work.

The IPO turns what is often treated as a niche play—buying unglamorous software and running it hard—into a public-market proposition. On the day it listed, the market priced that proposition above $18 billion.