After an $18 billion IPO, the Bending Spoons founder says success comes from minimizing luck

AOL is going public again – sort of. Its owner is Bending Spoons, the 13-year-old Italian company that has quietly acquired beloved but struggling online brands over the past decade, went public on the Nasdaq today, opening at a valuation of more than $18 billion, and then the stock rose 40% at market close.

Bending Spoons, headquartered in Milan, has applied some of the private equity rules of the game to a long string of acquisitions – Meetup, Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and many others. But it’s not a buy-and-sell scheme: it wants to transform these companies with technology and then retain them.

“We want to position ourselves as an operator that takes beloved brands and makes them much better,” Matteo Daniele, co-founder and chief product officer, told TechCrunch.

The “how” has generated controversy over the years, especially regarding layoffs. But the company has also led revenue growth, especially with artificial intelligence. “In the last year and a half, we’ve seen an incredible acceleration in the pace at which we’ve been able to ship new features and create value for users,” Daniele told TechCrunch.

This may be the right thing to say when investors, both public and private, have a greater appetite for AI than legacy SaaS companies. But Bending Spoons has an argument: Its F-1s, the equivalent of S-1 forms for foreign companies, include a chapter titled “AI Before It Was Cool” — a nod to its roots.

Before Bending Spoons, there was Evertale, “a product that would automatically create a diary about your life by leveraging what we call artificial intelligence today, which we called machine learning back then,” Daniele said. That startup failed, but it taught lessons for the co-founders and team members who now lead Bending Spoons — Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Luca Cirella, and Daniele.

“It sparked a thought about the fact that you don’t always find a perfect correlation between how talented entrepreneurs are and the success they achieve, especially from zero to one,” Daniele said. “And luck is a very big element in this equation. So we developed an obsession to find a strategy that would, as much as possible, minimize the role that luck plays in growth and success.”

The company also stated this philosophy in its F-1 with statements such as: “Luck plays a huge role in finding product-market fit,” and “Luck is irrelevant when striving for operational excellence.”

These mantras appear in areas such as the pricing of their products. “We’re trying to leverage the sophisticated data tracking, analytics infrastructure, and testing toolset we’ve developed.”

According to Daniele, this sometimes leads to the company releasing more features for free to promote word of mouth. But it also led to higher prices, sparking complaints from long-term subscribers. Despite this, he says customer retention has been “remarkably stable”.

One acquisition in particular was scrutinized. “Evernote was probably the first product we had that users really liked, so we had very strict judges.” This is what he’s most proud of – including the AI-powered version 11 update. He said the company ultimately won over users with its changes that were praised by many subscribers, including Evernote co-founder Phil Libin.

Bending Spoons has started to get more support over the years. It was valued at $11 billion in a private equity round before its IPO, and had venture capital firms and bigwigs on its capital table, including big names from technology and entertainment. However, in their early years, venture capital firms struggled to understand their approach. “We’ve gotten a lot of ‘you’re crazy’ reactions over the years,” Daniele recalls.

This is also expressed in the company’s slogan “Impossible. Maybe.”

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

The numbers seem to agree. According to its SEC filing, “Thanks in part to advances in artificial intelligence, revenue per FTE Spooner equivalent increased from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, and reached $0.97 million in the first quarter of 2026.”

This also explains why Bending Spoons made the unusual decision to bring the entire company to New York to celebrate its listing. “It’s another tool for us to access the liquidity we need to fuel our acquisition strategy, but we also thought that one day it would be the right thing to take it all and enjoy the moment with all our colleagues,” Daniele said.

This is just one day, though. After that, Bending Spoons will return to buying companies — and will benefit from the decline in SaaS valuations that it itself has managed to escape, according to Daniele. “From a buyer’s perspective and as a company that grows through acquisitions, this is actually a great opportunity and moment to deploy capital.”