AOL is public again — sort of. Its owner Bending Spoons, the 13-year-old Italian company that has been quietly acquiring beloved but ailing Internet brands for the past decade, went public on the Nasdaq today, opening at an over $18 billion valuation, with the stock then popping 40% by market close.
Headquartered in Milan, Bending Spoons applied some of the private equity playbook to a long series of acquisitions — Meetup, Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and many others. But it is not a flip-and-sell scheme: it wants to transform these companies with tech and then hold onto them.
“We want to place ourselves as an operator that takes beloved brands and makes them much better,” its cofounder and chief product officer, Matteo Danieli, told TechCrunch.
The ‘how’ has generated controversy over the years, especially around layoffs. But the company also drove revenue growth, even more so with AI. “In the past year and a half, we’ve witnessed an incredible acceleration in the pace at which we were able to ship new features and create value for users,” Danieli told TechCrunch.
That may be the right thing to say when investors, public and private, have much more appetite for AI than for aging SaaS businesses. But Bending Spoons has a case: its F-1, the equivalent of S-1 forms for foreign companies, includes a chapter called ‘AI before it was cool’ — a nod to its roots.
