After an $18B IPO, the founder of Bending Spoons says success comes from a bit of luck

AOL is public again – sort of. Owner Bending Spoons, the 13-year-old Italian company that has been quietly acquiring popular but ailing Internet brands for the past decade, went public on the Nasdaq today, opening at more than $18 billion, and the stock was off 40% at the close.

Headquartered in Milan, Bending Spoons used some of the private equity playbook in a long series of acquisitions – Meetup, Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and many others. But it’s not a browse-and-sell program: It wants to transform these companies with technology and stick with them.

“We want to position ourselves as a service that takes popular brands and makes them even better,” its founder and chief product officer, Matteo Danieli, told TechCrunch.

The “method” has caused controversy over the years, especially regarding layoffs. But the company has also boosted revenue growth, particularly through AI. “Over the past year and a half, we’ve seen an incredible acceleration in the speed at which we’ve been able to ship new features and create user numbers,” Daniel told TechCrunch.

That would be the right thing to say when investors, both public and private, are more interested in AI than in established SaaS businesses. But Bending Spoons is guilty: Its IF-1, the equivalent of third-party S-1 forms, includes a chapter called “AI before it was cool” — a nod to its roots.

Before Bending Spoons, there was Evertale, “a product that would automatically create a diary of your life using what you would call AI today, and what we called machine learning back then,” Daniel said. That startup failed, but taught lessons to the co-founders and team members who now lead Bending Spoons – Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Luca Querella, and Danieli.

“It made us think about the fact that you don’t always find a perfect correlation between how talented entrepreneurs are and how successful they are, especially from zero to one. Luck is a very big part of that equation. So we created a desire to find a strategy that could, as much as possible, reduce the role that luck plays in growth and success,” said Daniel.

The company also stated this philosophy in its F-1 with lines such as, “Luck plays a major role in achieving product-market fit,” and “luck is irrelevant in the pursuit of excellence.”

Those words come from places like pricing their products. “We’re trying to use the sophisticated data tracking, analytics infrastructure and testing toolkit we’ve developed.”

According to Daniel, this sometimes leads the company to release more features for free to drive word of mouth. But it also led to price hikes that caused complaints from long-term subscribers. Despite this, however, he says customer retention is “incredibly stable.”

One discovery was particularly scrutinized. “Evernote may have been the first product we found that was really popular with users, so we had very strong judges.” That’s what it’s most proud of – including its AI-heavy v11 update. He said the company eventually won over users with its changes that were praised by many subscribers, including Evernote founder Phil Libin.

Bending Spoons began to gain more support over the years. Valued at $11 billion in a private equity round before its IPO, it had both VC firms and VIPs at its asset table, including big names from tech and entertainment. In its earlier years, however, VCs struggled to understand its approach. “We have had many opinions that he is ‘crazy’ over the years,” recalls Daniel.

That’s also captured by the company’s tagline, “Impossible. Maybe.”

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

The numbers seem to agree. According to the SEC filing, “in part helped by advances in AI, income per full-time equivalent Spooner rose from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, and was $0.97 million in Q1 2026.”

This also explains why Bending Spoons took the unusual decision to bring the entire company to New York to celebrate its listing. “It’s another tool for us to get the money we need to continue our acquisition strategy, but we also thought that one day it would be appropriate to take it all and enjoy this time with all our partners,” said Daniel.

However, that is just one day. After that, Bending Spoons will go back to the buying companies — and use the reduced SaaS rates it managed to get away with, according to Daniel. “From a consumer perspective and as a company growing through acquisitions, that’s a great opportunity and moment to capitalize.”