NEW YORK — The company that just reopened Wall Street’s frozen market for software stocks does not build artificial intelligence, chase cloud contracts, or promise to automate anyone’s job. It buys the internet’s discarded relics — AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, a diary app nobody remembers — strips their costs and squeezes them for cash. On Wednesday, that unglamorous formula was worth $25.5 billion to the investors who priced its stock.
Bending Spoons S.p.A. priced its initial public offering at $29 a share, above the marketed range of $26 to $28, raising $1.68 billion by selling 58 million shares. The stock opened around $31 on the Nasdaq under the ticker BSP and surged as high as 41 percent intraday before settling with a first-day gain near 40 percent, according to the Associated Press, which put the company’s market value at $25.5 billion by the close.
The timing is the story as much as the number. Software companies have largely sat out the 2026 IPO market, a drought that traces back to fears that generative AI would gut the subscription businesses public investors had spent a decade rewarding. OpenAI’s own advisers reportedly pushed to delay its listing into 2027 after a semiconductor rout froze South Korea’s stock exchange and erased over a trillion dollars from chip valuations. Against that backdrop, a company whose entire pitch is that it is not a fragile AI-era software bet, but a permanent owner of unglamorous, already-profitable internet brands, became the test case nobody expected.
Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, told Reuters the debut would count as a data point for the software industry, though he cautioned that may be more a function of how scarce such listings have become than a verdict on demand. Bending Spoons, he added, carries a profile unlike almost anything else in the current IPO pipeline. Renaissance Capital’s own trading desk flagged the pricing on social media within hours of the deal closing, noting the Italian acquirer had priced above range on a stock ticker few American investors had heard of a year ago.
The company itself was born out of failure. Luca Ferrari and three university friends, Matteo Danieli, Francesco Patarnello and Luca Querella, founded Bending Spoons in Milan in 2013 with roughly $40,000 left over after liquidating their first venture, a diary app called Evertale that never found a market. Rather than build new products from scratch, the group began buying software companies that had plateaued, cutting costs and re-engineering them for growth. The strategy has since compounded into more than 50 acquisitions, according to Forbes, which now estimates Ferrari’s personal stake alone is worth more than $2 billion.
What separates Bending Spoons from a conventional private equity roll-up is that it does not sell what it buys. Tim Schumacher, founder of the investment firm saas.group, described the company to Reuters as a high-conviction venture bet dressed in the clothing of a holding company, and said the real test of that model arrives only once it has survived a full economic cycle rather than the favorable one it has enjoyed so far. The portfolio now includes Vimeo, Eventbrite, Evernote, Brightcove, WeTransfer, Meetup and, since a deal last year, AOL — the dial-up-era internet pioneer whose own homepage now quietly runs wire coverage of its parent company’s stock market debut.
The underlying business is smaller than its market value might suggest. Bending Spoons reported net income of $27.5 million on revenue of $601 million for the first three months of 2026, with more than 500 million monthly active users and roughly 9 million paying customers across its apps, the Associated Press reported. The company also carries just under $4.4 billion in debt, a legacy of financing acquisitions that included AOL and Vimeo through leveraged deals rather than equity swaps. That leverage is the quiet risk sitting underneath Wednesday’s rally: a portfolio built on distressed, aging internet brands financed with borrowed money has not yet been tested by a downturn.
Wall Street’s enthusiasm on Wednesday reopened a door that had been shut for most of the year, part of a second-quarter IPO window that already included SpaceX’s record-breaking Nasdaq listing and roughly $100 billion in combined proceeds. Whether Bending Spoons’ debut reflects genuine investor confidence in its buy-and-hold model, or simply relief that a software listing finally arrived that was not another AI valuation bet, is a question this week’s trading cannot answer. That verdict belongs to Bending Spoons’ first quarterly earnings call as a public company, not its opening bell.
