MILAN — Vimeo built a video platform over two decades with engineers, product designers, and a team that understood what filmmakers needed. When Bending Spoons acquired the company in September 2025, it kept the platform and shed most of the people. The entire video team is gone. The ongoing work of maintaining and updating Vimeo’s codebase is increasingly being done by AI. Bending Spoons raised $1.68 billion on the Nasdaq on Tuesday at an $18.4 billion valuation, and the market priced that arrangement without blinking.
Bending Spoons is an Italian software company, founded in Milan in 2013 by Luca Ferrari and four co-founders after their first startup failed. Its model is straightforward to describe and ruthless to execute: identify digital platforms with large user bases and declining growth, acquire them at prices that reflect their cash flow rather than their potential, cut the staff, centralize the infrastructure, and let AI handle an increasing share of the software development. The company describes this as “improving operations.” The F-1 filing it submitted to regulators before its IPO describes $78.6 million in “reorganization-related expenses” in 2025 alone.
The portfolio now includes AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, and Meetup, along with roughly 50 other properties. Bending Spoons acquired approximately 1,830 employees across those deals. By the end of 2026, only a few hundred are expected to remain. AOL laid off more than 100 employees in February 2026. Vimeo’s entire video team was let go after the September 2025 acquisition. The company absorbed $78.6 million in reorganization costs while simultaneously tripling its operating profit between 2023 and 2025.
The AI code adoption number in Bending Spoons’ disclosures is striking in a way that makes the staffing reductions comprehensible rather than simply alarming. In the first quarter of 2025, AI was involved in fewer than 10 percent of the pull requests, the individual code changes submitted across its platforms’ repositories. A year later, that figure was above 90 percent. Roughly 70 percent of pull requests were written entirely by AI, with no human co-authorship at all. The company’s revenue per employee rose from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025. Fewer people, more AI, productivity metrics higher.
The financial results support that narrative. Revenue reached $1.31 billion for full-year 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, Bending Spoons posted $601 million in revenue, more than double the $259 million it recorded in the same quarter a year earlier. After a $112.2 million net loss in Q1 2025, the company swung to a $27.5 million net profit in Q1 2026. The IPO, priced at $29 per share above its initial $26 to $28 target range, opened Tuesday at $31, raised $1.68 billion including secondary share sales, and valued the company at $18.4 billion. Its last private round, in October 2025, valued it at $11.3 billion. The listing is the largest European startup Nasdaq debut since 2023.
The investor list includes Fidelity, Eric Schmidt, and the co-founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Ryan Reynolds is also a backer. The dual-class share structure included in the IPO means Luca Ferrari and his co-founders retain voting control regardless of outside shareholder preferences. That governance choice tends not to come up in coverage of a 40 percent first-day pop, but it shapes what the company can do next without asking investors for permission.
The harder question is what the products become over time. Evernote received an AI-heavy version 11 update after the acquisition. Vimeo continues to operate. AOL continues to exist. But the specific expertise of the engineers and product managers who built and maintained those platforms has, in significant part, been eliminated. The platforms are now being maintained and updated by AI systems trained on codebases built by teams that no longer exist. Whether that is adequate for a video platform competing with YouTube, Wistia, and Brightcove depends on whether maintenance and optimization are the primary engineering tasks ahead, or whether genuine product invention is still required. The Bending Spoons model does not prioritize original product development.
Ferrari told TechCrunch on the IPO date that success at Bending Spoons comes from “minimizing luck” — building processes rigorous and repeatable enough that individual variation matters less. The AI code adoption is the engineering expression of that thesis. It is also part of a broader reshaping of what tech companies need from human labor, one that the United Nations launched a commission to address this week. The Nasdaq just assigned an $18.4 billion value to the proposition that the older definitions of a software team no longer apply. The open question is whether the products on the other end of that efficiency bet keep working well enough to justify it.
