Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari Talks IPO

Bending Spoons lists on Nasdaq, still betting on acquisitions

Bending Spoons went public on Nasdaq as a serial buyer of digital businesses that it moves onto one shared technology platform. It looks for products with a few fixable weaknesses and expects most growth to keep coming from deals. Ferrari argues AI has made its small core team more productive rather than making its products easy to copy.

Takeaways

• Acquisitions remain the main growth engine. Buying digital businesses has been by far the most efficient growth lever. The company has roughly doubled every year, never sold a company it bought, and expects most future growth from deals. Its listing names over a thousand targets in Europe and North America.
• A shared platform lets it fix any target. Bending Spoons moves businesses of any age or growth profile onto one technology layer with more than fifty proprietary technologies, then rebuilds how each operates and earns money. It has no themes and needs a target with one or two weak fundamentals to fix.
• AI has boosted productivity, not eroded products. Ferrari concedes software has been easy to copy for a decade, yet says products win on brands and switching costs. Revenue per core team member rose from about $1m in 2023 to a $4m run rate in early 2026, mainly from AI.
• Only about two percent of users pay. Bending Spoons has about nine million paying users, roughly two percent of its base. Ferrari hopes to raise that share but wants to monetize as little as possible, because a large free base brings value through word of mouth.
• It has never sold user data. Asked about data deals with AI companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic, Ferrari says the company has never sold data or let third parties train models on it, and has no plans to. It targets value ten or twenty years out.
• Founders keep control as a first-time public company. Ferrari and his co-founders hold all Class A shares and almost 83 percent of votes. Ferrari says he will take shareholder input to heart, admits he has never run a public company, and expects it to be hard.

AOL turnaround plan

• Bending Spoons bought AOL from Apollo for about $1.5bn last year.
• AOL has about thirty million monthly users. Some pay and the rest are monetized through advertising.
• Growth has been slow for three or four years. Ferrari expects it to continue and maybe accelerate.
• Ferrari says the product is better than people think but not on par with some competitors.
• Planned fixes cover the email client, web portal, advertising technology and recommender system.
• He calls it one of the most exciting acquisitions of recent years.