The bankers had guided investors to 26 to 28 dollars a share, but by the time the order book closed, the bids had climbed past the top of that range. Bending Spoons, the Italian company that built a portfolio of internet brands by buying and fixing struggling apps, priced its initial public offering at 29 dollars a share, raising 1.68 billion dollars and valuing the company at about 18 billion dollars.
The stock is set to begin trading Wednesday on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, with the offering expected to settle the following day. The company sold 34.4 million of the roughly 58 million shares in the deal, with the remainder coming from existing shareholders, who took the opportunity to cash out part of their positions at a price higher than the company itself had expected.
The IPO is a test of an unusual business model. Bending Spoons does not invent products; it acquires them, cuts their costs, improves their technology and tries to grow them, a strategy closer to private equity than to the venture-backed growth playbook that has dominated the software industry. Its portfolio includes AOL, the internet pioneer, Eventbrite, the ticketing platform, and Vimeo, the video-sharing service.
The deal was also a study in how far Bending Spoons has come from its origins. The company started as an app developer, producing popular mobile utilities, before pivoting to acquisitions as its own products matured. That pivot, from maker to buyer, is what caught the attention of investors: in an industry obsessed with building from scratch, Bending Spoons has made a large and profitable business out of buying, fixing and growing what others built.
The acquisition spree has been expensive. Since November, Bending Spoons has spent more than 3.3 billion dollars buying AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo, deals that loaded the company with debt and raised questions about how it would fund its next purchases. The IPO answers that question: the proceeds give the company fresh capital and a public currency for future acquisitions.
The pricing above the range suggests investor demand was stronger than expected, a notable result in a market where technology IPOs have been hit or miss. S&P Global Ratings, in a recent report, said a successful listing would give the company new funding sources for more acquisitions, supporting its credit profile. The company has said it plans to keep buying, and the public markets give it a way to finance deals without taking on more debt.
The portfolio itself is a study in second acts. AOL, once the gateway to the internet for millions of Americans, has been reduced to a media brand with a fraction of its former reach. Eventbrite and Vimeo are profitable niches rather than category leaders. Bending Spoons’ skill has been in wringing efficiency out of these businesses, cutting costs and shifting them to subscription models, and the IPO is a bet that this approach can keep working at a larger scale.
The company’s founder, Luca Ferrari, has been the architect of the strategy. Ferrari, who studied at MIT and worked in software before starting Bending Spoons in 2013, has said publicly that the company evaluates acquisitions like an engineer evaluates code: look for something that works but could work better, then rebuild it. That philosophy has produced steady revenue growth, though critics note that cost-cutting has its limits as a growth strategy.
The risks for new investors are straightforward. Bending Spoons’ revenue depends on a portfolio of brands whose best days may be behind them, and its growth has come substantially from acquisitions rather than from organic expansion. The company will also face the scrutiny of public markets for the first time, including quarterly reporting and questions about how much of its cash flow goes to servicing the debt from its recent deals.
Italy’s technology sector has produced few companies of this scale, and the listing gives Bending Spoons a rare status: a European software company large enough to trade on a U.S. exchange with a global shareholder base. The company has said it will keep its headquarters in Milan, and Italian officials have welcomed the listing as evidence that the country can produce globally significant technology companies, a point of pride in a market long dominated by family industrial groups.
The broader IPO market will be watching. After a drought in technology listings, a successful debut for Bending Spoons could encourage other private companies with unusual business models to test the public markets. A weak debut, by contrast, would reinforce the caution that has kept many companies private.
The first day of trading will not settle the argument about whether Bending Spoons’ model is sustainable; that will take years of quarterly reports. But the pricing of the deal already tells investors something: in a market hungry for software assets, the story of a company that buys broken internet brands and makes them work is one enough people wanted to own.
