AOL is back in the public eye — sort of. Its owner, Vending Spoons, a 13-year-old Italian company that has been quietly buying up beloved but struggling Internet brands over the past decade, listed on the Nasdaq today at a valuation of more than $18 billion, and its stock has since soared 40% by market close.
Milan-based Bending Spoons has applied some of its private equity strategy to a long series of acquisitions, including Meetup, Eventbrite, Vimeo, and WeTransfer. But this is not a flip sales plan. We want to transform these companies with technology and then sustain them.
“We want to position ourselves as a business that makes beloved brands better,” Matteo Danieli, co-founder and chief product officer of the company, told TechCrunch.
The “how” has been a source of controversy over the years, especially regarding layoffs. But the company also drove revenue growth, and it grew even more thanks to AI. “Over the past year and a half, we've seen an incredible acceleration in the pace at which we're releasing new features and creating value for our users,” Danieli told TechCrunch.
This may be true given that public and private investors are far more interested in AI than in aging SaaS businesses. But Bending Spoons has a case. The company's F-1, the equivalent of a foreign company's S-1 form, includes a chapter called “AI before it was cool,” a nod to its roots.
Before Bending Spoons, there was a product called Evertale. “It’s a product that leverages what we would call AI today (then called machine learning) to automatically create a diary of your life,” Danieli says. That startup failed, but it taught a lesson to its co-founders and team members who now lead Bending Spoons: Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Luca Querella, and Danieli himself.
“It sparked a lot of reflection, especially around the fact that we don't always find a perfect zero-to-one correlation between entrepreneurial talent and success. Luck is a very big part of that equation, so we were obsessed with finding a strategy that would reduce as much as possible the role of luck in growth and success,” Danieli said.
The company also referenced this philosophy in F-1 with phrases such as “Luck plays a large role in finding product-market fit” and “Luck is irrelevant in the pursuit of operational excellence.”
These beliefs manifest in areas such as product pricing. “We are looking to leverage the advanced data tracking, analytical infrastructure and experimentation toolkits we have developed.”
According to Danieli, this is why the company sometimes releases more features for free to increase word of mouth. However, it also led to price increases that caused complaints from long-term subscribers. But despite this, customer retention rates have been “very stable,” he said.
One acquisition came under particular scrutiny. “We had a very tough jury on Evernote because it may be the first product we truly loved with our users.” This is what he's most proud of, including the AI-heavy v11 update. He said the company ultimately won over users with the change and was praised by many subscribers, including Evernote co-founder Phil Libin.
Bending Spoons itself has gained more traction over the years. Its pre-IPO private equity round valued it at $11 billion, with a cap table that included both venture capitalists and VIPs, including some of the biggest names in tech and entertainment. But in those early days, VCs had a hard time understanding the approach. “We've gotten a lot of 'you're crazy' reactions over the years,” Danieli recalls.
This is reflected in the company's tagline: “Impossible. Probably.”
Focusing on talent was also one of the lessons the Bending Spoons founders learned from their time at Evertale, and hiring became a focus. Co-founder Ferrari said, “We spent the majority of the first two to three years investing in our culture and recruitment process. We now believe we are great at finding talent, especially when they are young and don't yet have a huge track record.”
The numbers seem to match. “Due to advances in AI, Spooner's full-time equivalent revenue increased from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025 and $970,000 in the first quarter of 2026,” according to an SEC filing.
This also explains why Bending Spoons made the unusual decision to bring the entire company to New York to celebrate going public. “While this is another tool to access the liquidity we need to advance our acquisition strategy, we also felt it was the right thing to do for one day to take it all in and enjoy the moment with all of our colleagues,” Danieli said.
However, that was just one day. Danieli said Bending Spoons then plans to go back to acquiring companies and take advantage of the lower SaaS valuations it has managed to escape. “From a buyer's perspective and as a company growing through acquisitions, it's a great opportunity and moment to really deploy capital.”
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