Bending Spoons Sets Terms for $1.6 Billion Nasdaq IPO, Targeting Pricing the Week of June 29

The Numbers, and a Discrepancy Worth Noting

Bending Spoons announced IPO terms on Monday, June 22, 2026. The company plans to sell 58 million shares at $26 to $28 apiece, seeking to raise roughly $1.6 billion, according to Renaissance Capital.

The two primary sources on this story split in a material way. Renaissance Capital pegs the fully diluted market value at $9.7 billion at the midpoint of the price range. The Next Web, citing Reuters and unnamed people familiar with the matter, puts the valuation at roughly $19 billion at the top of the range. Both figures cannot be right.

The most likely explanation: the $9.7 billion figure from Renaissance Capital appears to reflect the fully diluted market capitalization based on shares outstanding at the IPO price midpoint, while the $19 billion figure cited by Reuters-via-TNW may incorporate a different share count, enterprise value, or a source pushing a rosier number. Investors should pin the offering documents—not unnamed sources—before treating either figure as settled.

The IPO is expected to price the week of June 29, 2026, according to Renaissance Capital. Trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol BSP would follow shortly after.

What Bending Spoons Actually Does

Founded in Milan in 2013 by CEO Luca Ferrari and four co-founders with roughly $40,000 in seed capital, according to The Next Web, Bending Spoons does not build software from scratch. It buys struggling digital businesses, fires most of the staff, rebuilds the technology, and extracts margin. The company has completed more than 50 acquisitions to date, per Renaissance Capital.

The current portfolio includes Vimeo (acquired for $1.38 billion), WeTransfer, AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, outdoor navigation tool Komoot, pet tracker Tractive, Brightcove, Harvest, Remini, and StreamYard. As of March 2026, the portfolio served over 500 million monthly active users and more than 9 million monthly paying customers, according to Renaissance Capital.

The layoffs at acquired companies are not incidental. They are the model. The Next Web reports headcount reductions at acquired companies often reach 70 percent or more. Evernote, Eventbrite, and Vimeo employees have all experienced this firsthand.

Revenue Growth Is Real

Whatever one thinks of the strategy, the financial trajectory is hard to argue with. Annual revenue rose from $387 million in 2023 to $671 million in 2024 to $1,310 million in 2025, according to The Next Web. For the twelve months ended March 31, 2026, Renaissance Capital puts total revenue at $1.6 billion.

The company also turned profitable. First-quarter 2026 results showed net income of roughly $28 million on revenue of $601 million, compared with a net loss of $112 million on revenue of $259 million in Q1 2025, per The Next Web.

The valuation it achieved in its last private round was $11 billion pre-money, after raising $710 million in late 2025 from T. Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, and Durable Capital Partners, according to The Next Web. Baillie Gifford is among the existing shareholders selling secondary shares in this offering.

The Fair Case for Skepticism

The strongest concern about Bending Spoons is structural, not emotional. Critics argue that the roll-up model—buy, cut, optimize, repeat—works until it doesn't. Many of the brands in the portfolio (AOL, Evernote, WeTransfer) are legacy names competing in crowded or declining categories. Revenue growth driven by acquisitions is fundamentally different from organic growth; without new deals, the compounding stops. And the model depends heavily on continued access to cheap capital for acquisitions, which is never guaranteed.

There is also a workforce question. Mass layoffs produce short-term margin expansion. Whether they preserve the product quality and user trust that made these businesses worth buying is a longer-term bet that the IPO timeline does not resolve.

The Broader Context

The listing would rank among the largest IPOs by a European company in 2026, per The Next Web. BNP Paribas—which is also one of the joint bookrunners on this deal, per Renaissance Capital—has argued that anticipated US mega-IPOs from SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic would pull European tech firms toward American public markets. Bending Spoons is the most direct test of that thesis so far.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Allen & Co are leading the offering, with Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Jefferies, Evercore ISI, and a string of European banks including BNP Paribas, Mizuho, Societe Generale, Credit Agricole, Intesa Sanpaolo, UniCredit, and Banca Akros serving as joint bookrunners, according to Renaissance Capital.

Which valuation number is actually supported by the prospectus share count needs to be reconciled before the week of June 29 arrives. The $9.7 billion and $19 billion figures require clarity from Bending Spoons' S-1 filing.