About a decade ago, Tom Colicchio started writing checks. Not large ones at first, and not on his own thesis—he is the first to say he doesn’t have the wherewithal to evaluate a company. His method was to find people who did, watch what they were putting in, and ride alongside if the conviction looked real.
That is how a friend told him about Bending Spoons.
The Milan-based technology conglomerate closed a $710 million equity round in October 2025 at an $11 billion pre-money valuation, making it one of a handful of European tech decacorns. Colicchio got in early, exited around that round, and walked away with what he says was roughly a 15x return.
“Essentially, Bending Spoons covered everything else that I’ve done, and then some,” he told me, sitting in his office above his flagship restaurant in Manhattan’s Gramercy neighborhood. The company is now reportedly preparing a U.S. listing that could value it at nearly $20 billion.
Bending Spoons is best understood as a software rollup: it acquires underperforming consumer apps—Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Meetup, Eventbrite, AOL—and aggressively re-monetizes them, typically with deep staff cuts and price increases. It is exactly the kind of efficiency-first operator that, in another setting, Colicchio will tell you has helped hollow out creative industries. He does not pretend the tension isn’t there. He just took the trade.
