Bending Spoons does not build many apps. It buys them, fixes the finances, and runs them. Now it wants Wall Street to buy a piece of the machine.
The Milan-based group behind Evernote, WeTransfer, and Vimeo has filed for a US initial public offering, submitting a Form F-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission. It plans to list its ordinary shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker “BSP”, in what would be one of the year’s most closely watched European tech debuts.
The company has not set a price, but reports put its target valuation at around $20bn, nearly double the $11.7bn it was worth in an equity raise just eight months ago.
The filing shows why investors are interested. Revenue rose from $387mn in 2023 to $671mn in 2024 and $1.31bn in 2025, a compound annual growth rate of 84 per cent. Chief executive Luca Ferrari has said adjusted earnings should roughly double again this year, to about $1.4bn, and the portfolio now reaches hundreds of millions of users and more than nine million paying customers.
What makes Bending Spoons unusual is how it grows.
Rather than chase the next big launch, it behaves more like a private-equity firm with an in-house engineering team, acquiring established but underperforming digital products, stripping out costs, and running them at scale. Its purchases include Evernote, Meetup, Brightcove, Eventbrite, AOL, the route-planner Komoot, and, last November, Vimeo for about $1.38bn.
The approach is lucrative but blunt: acquisitions are routinely followed by deep layoffs, as Vimeo’s staff discovered.
That it is listing in New York rather than Europe is itself a statement.
For all the talk of building a pan-European answer to Nasdaq, the continent’s biggest tech companies still gravitate to US markets for their deeper pools of capital and richer valuations, a tension laid bare when Monzo weighed New York against London.
Bending Spoons, one of Europe’s most valuable privately held tech firms, is the latest to choose Wall Street.
It also caps a striking rise for Italy’s tech scene, long overshadowed by France and Germany, and now drawing names from Anthropic to Milan. Founded in 2013 and led by Ferrari, who will keep control alongside two co-founders through a special class of shares, Bending Spoons has turned a contrarian thesis, that the internet is full of good products run badly, into a multibillion-dollar business.
The risk is the one that haunts any roll-up: growth that depends on finding ever-larger targets, and on integrating them without breaking what made them worth buying.
A public listing would give Bending Spoons more firepower to keep shopping. It would also, for the first time, show the world exactly how well the machine runs.
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