Bending Spoons S.p.A. began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on July 1, 2026, under the ticker "BSP", raising $1.68 billion in an IPO priced at $29 per share — and closing its first session roughly 40% higher after opening at $31. The Milan-headquartered company briefly crossed a $25 billion market cap in early trading, more than doubling its last private valuation of $11 billion and well above the $18 billion-plus figure implied by the IPO pricing itself.

The offering comprised 34,398,640 ordinary shares of no par value, structured via an SEC Form F-1 — the registration vehicle for foreign private issuers. Bending Spoons made its filing public on June 8, 2026, with the final prospectus lodged on June 30.

The numbers behind the listing are worth examining on their own terms. TechCrunch reports full-year 2025 revenue of $1.31 billion, up sharply from $387 million in 2023 — a roughly 3.4x increase over two years. As of March 2026, the company's portfolio served more than 500 million monthly active users and over 9 million monthly paying subscribers, per its SEC filing. Those are not vanity metrics: a conversion rate of roughly 1.8% from MAUs to paying customers across a portfolio of mature consumer apps is a real operating signal.

What Bending Spoons Actually Is

CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari and CPO and co-founder Matteo Danieli built the company out of the wreckage of Evertale, a Copenhagen-based startup that appeared in the Startup Alley at Disrupt SF 2011. The pivot eventually landed in Milan, where the company incorporated as an Italian società per azioni — hence the S.p.A. suffix and the F-1 rather than an S-1 filing.

The business model is acquisitive by design. Bending Spoons buys consumer and prosumer software products — often distressed or undervalued — applies operational and AI-driven product work, and scales them through a centralised platform. The current portfolio includes AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, and Issuu, the last of which was acquired from entrepreneur Joe Hyrkin in 2024. The AOL acquisition in particular drew widespread attention; the brand has traded hands multiple times since its peak, and Bending Spoons acquiring it caps an unlikely arc.

Not everything in the company's history is commercial. In 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bending Spoons built and donated Immuni — Italy's official national contact-tracing app — to the Italian government at no charge. It was a notable act of civic engineering at scale, and it gave the company a public profile in Europe well before its larger acquisition spree.

The Broader Picture

The revenue trajectory is the most straightforward case for the valuation. Growing from $387 million in 2023 to $1.31 billion in 2025 while reaching half a billion monthly active users is a defensible foundation for a $18-plus billion listing, even accounting for the fact that many of those underlying brands — Vimeo and Eventbrite among them — have had turbulent recent histories as independent companies.

The 40% first-day pop is harder to read cleanly. On one hand, it suggests the offering was priced conservatively relative to market demand — a deliberate choice underwriters often make to ensure a successful debut. On the other, a gap that wide between IPO price and opening market price is capital left on the table from the company's perspective. How BSP trades over the subsequent weeks, once the lockup dynamics and post-IPO sentiment normalise, will say more about the durability of that valuation than the debut session alone.

Worth flagging: a material share of Bending Spoons' revenue base sits in brands — AOL, Meetup, Eventbrite — that occupy contested or declining segments of their respective markets. The company's thesis is that operational efficiency and AI-assisted product iteration can extract more value from these assets than their previous owners managed. The 2023-to-2025 revenue trajectory suggests the approach has traction. Whether it scales into a genuine platform at public-market multiples is a live question.

What the IPO does establish clearly is that a European consumer software acquirer, with Italian incorporation and a relatively low public profile outside specialist circles, has now built a business large enough to command serious attention on the Nasdaq. The path from a Copenhagen startup that pitched at Disrupt SF 2011 to a $25 billion market cap moment took fifteen years and a very particular playbook.