Bending Spoons surges 40% in Nasdaq debut after $1.68 billion IPO

Bending Spoons opened on Nasdaq with a sharp pop on Wednesday, then finished its first day of trading nearly 40% higher after pricing its initial public offering above range at $29 a share. The listing raised about $1.68 billion for the Milan-based company and some existing shareholders, giving investors an early chance to decide whether a business built on rescuing aging digital brands can command the kind of premium usually reserved for faster-growing software names.

The stock’s surge made the debut a closely watched test of demand for tech equity after a bruising stretch for traditional SaaS companies, which had fallen earlier in 2026 on fears that AI-powered software could chip away at parts of the sector. Reuters reported Bending Spoons was valued at about $19.7 billion at the open and $25.7 billion by the close, a jump that suggested the market was willing to pay for its acquisition-heavy model even as many software names remained under pressure.

Bending Spoons has spent years assembling a portfolio that includes AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, Meetup and Vimeo, buying underperforming internet brands and then trying to improve them. The company has described its approach as acquiring consumer software and internet businesses and revamping them, while Reuters characterized the strategy as buying and restructuring struggling tech companies. The result looks like a hybrid of private-equity style roll-ups and operating software management, a structure that has become more visible just as public markets have been skeptical of legacy SaaS growth.

The company’s financial scale helped the pitch. Bending Spoons said first-quarter 2026 revenue reached $601.3 million, up sharply from a year earlier, and Yahoo Finance noted revenue more than doubled from $258.9 million in the prior-year period while net profit rose to $27.5 million. Bending Spoons also said it serves more than 500 million monthly active users, a reach that gives Luca Ferrari’s company unusual distribution across consumer software. Ferrari, who co-founded Bending Spoons in 2013, has built the business into one of Europe’s most closely watched software consolidators, and the first-day trading made clear that investors are still prepared to reward a differentiated story when the broader software market is under strain.