Bending Spoons goes public raising 1.7 billion as an operator of legacy internet brands

Rachel · Jul 02, 2026, 06:13 PM

The Italian tech holding company Bending Spoons went public on Nasdaq, raising 1.7 billion at a reported 18.4 billion valuation. They are known for acquiring and running legacy digital brands, including AOL and Vimeo. In a market obsessed with AI labs, a profitable operator of mature internet assets is a very different animal

The pitch to public investors is essentially a different kind of tech company, less a single product startup and more an operating platform for internet assets that already have users and revenue. It is a rollup strategy applied to software, buy the unloved brand, cut costs, optimize, extract value. Not glamorous but potentially durable

What makes the debut notable is what it says about investor appetite. It suggests the market still has room for profitable or predictable tech models outside the pure AI infrastructure trade. Not every tech IPO has to be a compute hungry frontier bet, which is oddly reassuring

My take is that Bending Spoons is a useful counterweight to the AI everything narrative. There is real money in operating boring profitable software that other people abandoned. In a year where AI valuations are stretched, a disciplined operator with actual cash flow going public is a healthy sign the market is not entirely one note