Bending Spoons, the Milan-based company that has quietly assembled a portfolio of digital brands most people have actually heard of, just pulled off one of the year’s biggest tech IPOs. The Italian firm priced its Nasdaq listing above the marketed range of $26 to $28 per share, raising approximately $1.62 billion in the process.
The offering implies a market valuation in the neighborhood of $19 billion to $20 billion.
The roll-up machine goes public
Bending Spoons doesn’t build products from scratch. It buys them. The company’s entire playbook revolves around acquiring underperforming digital businesses, stripping them down, and optimizing them for profitability.
The portfolio includes Evernote, Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite. Bending Spoons has completed over 50 acquisitions historically, building a user base of over 400 to 500 million monthly active users.
