Bending Spoons prices $1.68B Nasdaq IPO above range at $29

The interesting part of the Bending Spoons debut isn't the size of the raise. It's what the company actually is. According to Bloomberg, the Milan-based software holding company and its backers, which include Baillie Gifford, sold 57.97 million shares at $29 apiece, above a marketed range of $26 to $28, to raise $1.68 billion in what the reporting frames as a rare software IPO and one of the largest US listings by a European company this year. Shares are slated to begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker BSP, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Allen & Co leading the deal.

Bending Spoons is a rollup. It has spent the last few years buying software brands that had lost their way, Vimeo, Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup, AOL, Eventbrite, and running them out of Milan. The portfolio now claims more than 500 million monthly active users, and the company reported $601 million in revenue and $27.5 million in net income for the quarter ended March 31, a sharp reversal from a $112.2 million loss the year before. Roughly 60% of the IPO stock came from the company itself, with the remainder from existing shareholders trimming their positions.

The reason to pay attention isn't that a software company went public, plenty do. It's that a software rollup did, in a market where public-market investors keep debating whether AI is going to compress the mature consumer-software category Bending Spoons specializes in buying. The bull case is that beaten-down consumer brands with real user bases are cheap, and a disciplined operator based in a low-cost European hub can rehabilitate them faster than a startup can rebuild trust and distribution from scratch. The bear case is that some of those user bases were already shrinking for reasons AI stands to accelerate.

The honest caveat is what the reporting doesn't give you. There is no clean breakdown of how much of the recent revenue reversal is organic versus driven by the Vimeo deal, no visibility into churn inside older assets like AOL and Evernote, and no specific playbook for how roughly a billion dollars of primary proceeds will be spent beyond the general "buy more software" pitch. The first two or three post-IPO acquisitions will tell you more about the thesis than the opening tick, especially if any of them are AI-native rather than distressed legacy.