Bending Spoons buys struggling software companies, trims their staff, and hands operations to coders. Yet investors just rewarded that strategy with a 14% pop on the first day of trading.
Shares began trading at $31 on the Nasdaq exchange, carrying the symbol BSP. It climbed as high as $33.14, a 14% gain from the IPO price.
Eighty-five percent of the IPO allocation went to the 10 biggest investors, both new and existing holders. Baillie Gifford was among the investors that sold shares in the deal. Lead underwriters included Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Allen & Co.
CEO Luca Ferrari described the company's approach simply. "The upside of what we do is we buy these companies and rebuild them from scratch almost."
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Bending Spoons buys largely subscription-based services, trims their staff, and hands operations to coders. Beyond Vimeo, which was acquired in 2025, the company's holdings also include AOL, the note-taking tool Evernote, the file-sharing platform WeTransfer, and the AI-driven photo app Remini.
"It's led to really high returns, as we disclosed in our prospectus," Ferrari said. "But at the same time, one disadvantage is that it takes a lot of time."
The company's strategy of acquiring undervalued subscription services and overhauling their operations has produced dramatic financial improvements. In just over a year, Bending Spoons transformed from a $112 million net loss in the first quarter of 2025 to a $27.5 million profit in the same period of 2026, while revenue more than doubled. This rapid turnaround, combined with a massive user base of 500 million monthly actives, has attracted strong investor enthusiasm.
The strategy is working. Monthly active users grew from 111 million in December 2023 to 500 million as of March 2026. Monthly paying customers jumped from 3 million to 9 million over the same period.
Even after that torrid growth, Bending Spoons has a huge opportunity ahead. It only monetizes a little over nine million of its 500 million monthly active users.
"We serve approximately half of one billion monthly active users and only monetize a little over nine million," Ferrari said. "So there's plenty of room for organic growth, even assuming we never acquire a new user ever again."
The company's market value after the first trading day was roughly $21 billion. That is up from a valuation of about $14.5 billion in 2025, when it raised $270 million in primary capital, $440 million in secondary capital, and a $2.8 billion debt package.
The big question is whether Bending Spoons can convert more of its free users into paying customers. If it does, the stock could keep rising even without new acquisitions.
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