Bending Spoons Seeks Up to $1.62 Billion in U.S. IPO at $19 Billion Valuation
Taylor Wilson
Italian software company Bending Spoons plans a Nasdaq IPO raising up to $1.62 billion at a roughly $19 billion valuation — a rare large-scale software listing that will test institutional appetite for the acquire-and-rebuild business model.
What does this company actually do?
Bending Spoons was founded in Milan in 2013. Its playbook: buy existing digital businesses, then overhaul them — cut teams, compress costs, push margins up.
In plain terms = it doesn't build products from scratch; it buys someone else's product and runs it leaner.
Its portfolio now includes video platform Vimeo, file-sharing service WeTransfer, legacy internet brand AOL, and ticketing platform Eventbrite — the last two acquired this year.
Where does the IPO money come from — and go?
The company plans to sell 58 million shares at $26–$28 per share, raising up to $1.62 billion at the top end.
Roughly 60% are newly issued shares — that cash goes to the company. The remaining ~40% are existing-holder sales, including Scottish asset manager Baillie Gifford.
This means → Bending Spoons itself nets roughly $970 million; the rest is early investors cashing out.
Why did the financials improve so sharply?
Q1 this year: revenue $601 million, net profit $27.5 million.
Q1 last year: revenue just $259 million, net loss $112.2 million.
This means → revenue more than doubled and losses flipped to profit, driven mainly by stacked revenue from rapid-fire acquisitions plus cost-side restructuring taking effect.
Valuation jumped from $11 billion to $19 billion in six months?
A late-2025 private round valued the company at $11 billion pre-money. The IPO's upper-end pricing implies roughly $19 billion.
In plain terms = a ~73% markup in about half a year — the company is using the IPO window to recapture the discount from its private-market round.
This reflects a genuinely warmer U.S. IPO market: 179 deals year-to-date, raising a combined ~$150 billion — the strongest start to a year since 2021, per Dealogic.
What makes this deal worth watching?
Joint bookrunners are Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Allen & Co. The listing targets early July on Nasdaq Global Select Market under ticker "BSP."
It is set to be one of the largest European-to-U.S. IPOs this year and a rare big-ticket software listing at a time when AI is reshaping the sector and thinning the IPO pipeline.
This means → whether the deal prices near the $28 ceiling will directly gauge institutional conviction in the acquire-and-integrate model — a result with signaling power for the entire software M&A space.
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.