After $18B IPO, Bending Spoons founder says success comes from minimizing luck

AOL is public again — sort of. Its owner Bending Spoons, the 13-year-old Italian company that has been quietly acquiring beloved but ailing Internet brands for the past decade, went public on the Nasdaq today, opening at an over $18 ​billion valuation, with the stock then popping 40% by market close.

Headquartered in Milan, Bending Spoons applied some of the private equity playbook to a long series of acquisitions — Meetup, Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and many others. But it is not a flip-and-sell scheme: it wants to transform these companies with tech and then hold onto them.

“We want to place ourselves as an operator that takes beloved brands and makes them much better,” its cofounder and chief product officer, Matteo Danieli, told TechCrunch.

The ‘how’ has generated controversy over the years, especially around layoffs. But the company also drove revenue growth, even more so with AI. “In the past year and a half, we’ve witnessed an incredible acceleration in the pace at which we were able to ship new features and create value for users,” Danieli told TechCrunch. 

That may be the right thing to say when investors, public and private, have much more appetite for AI than for aging SaaS businesses. But Bending Spoons has a case: its F-1, the equivalent of S-1 forms for foreign companies, includes a chapter called ‘AI before it was cool’ — a nod to its roots.

Before Bending Spoons, there was Evertale, “a product that would automatically create a diary of your life by leveraging what you would call AI today, and that we called machine learning then,” Danieli said. That startup failed, but it taught lessons to the cofounders and team members who now lead Bending Spoons — Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Luca Querella, and Danieli himself. 

“It sparked a reflection around the fact that you don’t always find perfect correlation between how talented entrepreneurs are and the success they have, especially from zero to one. Luck is a very big component of that equation. So we developed an obsession for finding a strategy that would, as much as possible, reduce the role that luck plays in growth and success,” Danieli said.

The company also mentioned this philosophy in its F-1 with such lines as, “Luck plays a big role in finding product-market fit,” and “luck is irrelevant when pursuing operational excellence.”

Those mantras show up in areas like pricing its products. “We try to leverage the sophisticated data tracking, analytics infrastructure and experimentation toolkit that we’ve developed.” 

According to Danieli, this sometimes leads the company to release more features for free to drive word of mouth. But it has also led to price increases that sparked complaints from long-term subscribers. Despite this, however, he says customer retention has been “remarkably stable.”

One acquisition was particularly scrutinized. “Evernote may be the first product we acquired that was genuinely loved by users, so we had very strict judges.” That’s the one he’s most proud of — including its AI-heavy v11 update. He said the company eventually won over users with its changes that were praised by many subscribers, including Evernote cofounder Phil Libin.

Bending Spoons itself started getting more support over the years. Valued at $11 billion in a private equity round before its IPO, it had both VC firms and VIPs on its cap table, including big names from tech and entertainment. In its earlier years, however, VCs struggled to understand its approach. “We’ve got a lot of ‘you’re crazy’ reactions throughout the years,” Danieli recalled. 

That’s also captured by the company’s tagline, “Impossible. Maybe.”

Focusing on talent was also one of the lessons that Bending Spoons’ founders learned from their Evertale days, and hiring became a focus. The co-founder Ferrari “invested the best part of the first two or three years working on culture and hiring processes. We believe we now excel at spotting talent, especially when young and when they don’t have a great track record yet.”

The numbers seem to agree. According to its SEC filing, “in part helped by progress in AI, revenue per full-time equivalent Spooner increased from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, and was $0.97 million in Q1 2026.”

This also explains why Bending Spoons took the unusual decision of bringing the whole company to New York to celebrate its listing. “It’s one more tool for us to access the liquidity that we need to fuel our acquisitive strategy, but we also thought that for one day it would be the right thing to take it all in and enjoy the moment with all our colleagues,” Danieli said. 

That’s just one day, though. After that, Bending Spoons will go back to buying companies — and take advantage of slashed SaaS valuations it has itself managed to escape, according to Danieli. “From a buyer’s perspective and as a company that grows through acquisitions, that’s actually a great opportunity and moment to deploy capital.”