By Echo Wang and Elvira Pollina
June 30 – Bending Spoons, owner of the video platform Vimeo and the internet services company AOL, priced its U.S. initial public offering above its targeted range at $29 per share on Tuesday, raising $1.68 billion in a rare software IPO as the sector grapples with disruption from AI.
The Italian software company and its existing shareholders sold about 58 million shares in one of the largest IPOs by a European company this year. The shares were marketed between $26 and $28 apiece.
The company was valued at $11 billion in its last funding round in 2025.
The deal comes as the U.S. market for initial public offerings has regained momentum after a prolonged slowdown. SpaceX.O blockbuster debut earlier this month, the largest IPO on record, followed Cerebras Systems listing earlier this year, reflecting a pickup in activity among high-profile technology offerings.
Bending Spoons, whose name was inspired by a scene in the science-fiction film The Matrix, has emerged as one of Europe’s most prominent technology companies, pursuing a strategy of acquiring underperforming software businesses and overhauling them.
Among the brands Bending Spoons snapped up in recent years are the note-taking app Evernote, the file-sharing platform WeTransfer, the video-hosting service Vimeo, the streaming technology company Brightcove, the social networking platform Meetup, and the web portal AOL.
CEO Luca Ferrari, who co-founded the company in 2013 and is often seen in sneakers and oversized hoodies at the company’s headquarters in central Milan, described the strategy as a “hybrid” between a private equity fund and a technology company such as Alphabet’s Google.
“We’re engineers and scientists, and we spend almost all of our time building technologies and products,” he said.
Unlike private equity firms, Bending Spoons does not sell the companies it acquires. However, its takeovers have often been followed by deep restructuring and significant job cuts.
Bending Spoons’ shares are expected to start trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on Wednesday under the ticker “BSP”.
Goldman Sachs Group, JPMorgan Chase, and Allen & Co are the lead underwriters for the IPO.
(Reporting by Echo Wang in New York and Elvira Pollina in Milan and Natalia Bueno Rebolledo in Mexico City; Editing by Rashmi Aich)
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