AOL + Vimeo: Italian Bending Spoons goes to US stock exchange

Bending Spoons has made a name for itself primarily through other names: AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Harvest, Issuu, Komoot, Meetup, MileIQ, Mosaic, Remini, Splice, Streamyard, Vimeo, and Wetransfer are now among the brands of the Italian acquirer. Now it is aiming for the US stock exchange NASDAQ.

Bending Spoons filed the corresponding application for an IPO on Monday. Unlike various other IPO candidates currently making headlines, Bending Spoons makes money – and does so hardly with advertising but overwhelmingly through subscriptions. In 2025, the company generated 1.3 billion US dollars in revenue and realized 291 million US dollars in cash flow from it.

Operating profit amounted to 278 million US dollars, but the many debt-financed acquisitions resulted in no less than 143 million US dollars in interest. This caused net profit to shrink to 111 million US dollars. After deducting taxes, the net result was a red zero.

In March, Bending Spoons counted 500 million users, according to the stock prospectus, but only nine million of them paid anything. In the first quarter of 2026, 83 percent of revenue came from subscription fees and only ten percent from advertising. Nearly half of subscription revenue comes from users who have been with the company for at least five years, the prospectus says.

The strategy

However, the users are not part of the market that Bending Spoon is targeting. Instead, it has identified 1,000 other companies as the Total Addressable Market (theoretically possible market) that could perhaps be bought and which generated a total of 400 billion US dollars in revenue in 2025 (partly from each other, of course). A textbook example of stock market fantasy.

This, the management hopes, according to Reuters, will value Bending Spoons at at least 20 billion US dollars. As of the end of March, the company had almost six billion US dollars in debt. In the IPO, the company will issue new own shares. In addition, existing shareholders will offer shares. There will be no dividends. The extent of the free float is open but insignificant: the founders retain a non-tradable class of shares with five times the voting power.

The mountain of debt is set to grow. Because Bending Spoons' strategy consists of acquiring companies, whose workforce is then largely or, as with app operator Mosaic, entirely fired. Subsequently, the acquired project is to generate as much money as possible.

The latest acquisition is the Upper Austrian company Tractive. It offers GPS collars with a mobile communication module for dogs and cats, naturally with a subscription. Tractive's business operations acquired in May are not yet included in the published financial figures, as they only go up to the end of March.

Risk AI

In 2026, artificial intelligence naturally cannot be missing from a stock prospectus. “Many of our products and proprietary technologies incorporate AI, and we leverage AI extensively in our operations.” This is not without risk: “Our business depends in part on our ability to develop and use AI effectively, and AI may expose us to risks.”

The new sales channel fits in with this: AI agents are to be used to recommend subscriptions from the Bending Spoons portfolio: “We have invested in optimizing our customer acquisition through recommendations by AI agents.” So far, this has not paid off: “While this channel has contributed only marginally to date, we expect its contribution to increase over time.”

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