Bending Spoons, the Milan-based technology company that has built a sprawling portfolio by buying up well-known but underperforming digital apps and overhauling them, filed paperwork on Monday for an initial public offering in the United States—offering the public its first detailed look at the finances powering its acquisition spree.
The company’s revenue grew 95% year over year to $1.31 billion in 2025, according to the filing, and has more than tripled between 2023 and 2025. Unlike many high-growth tech companies that rush to go public while still losing money, Bending Spoons is profitable at the operating level. Operating profit more than doubled to $278 million in 2025 from $127 million a year earlier, and has more than tripled between 2023 and 2025.
The momentum carried into 2026. Revenue more than doubled to $601.3 million in the first quarter, from $258.9 million a year earlier, and Bending Spoons swung to a $27.5 million net profit, compared with a $112.2 million net loss in the same period of 2025. At the operating line, the company posted $120.2 million in operating income in Q1 of this year alone, reversing a $4.6 million operating loss a year earlier. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Allen & Company are the global lead book runners on the offering, alongside a large syndicate that includes BofA Securities, Jefferies, Wells Fargo Securities, Evercore, BNP Paribas, Mizuho, Société Générale, and UniCredit, among others.
Bending Spoons filed on Form F-1, the registration statement the Securities and Exchange Commission requires of foreign companies seeking to list shares on a U.S. exchange. Initial F-1 filings usually do not specify how many shares the company would sell, or at what price—details that are typically added in later amendments as an offering nears. It has applied to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker “BSP.” It will go public with a dual-class share structure that keeps control in its founders’ hands: Class A shares carry five votes each to ordinary shares’ one, and co-founders Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, and Luca Querella hold the Class A stock.
The bulk of Bending Spoons’ revenue is recurring. Subscriptions made up 93% of sales in 2025, while net revenue retention (a measure of how much existing customers keep spending over time) was 95% for the year, indicating the company held on to the vast majority of the revenue its current users generate.
The company has also rapidly expanded its audience. Monthly active users grew to 500 million in March 2026 from 111 million in December 2023, while the number of monthly paying customers tripled to 9 million from 3 million over the same time period.
The filing sketches out an unusually lean operation. Revenue per employee more than doubled between 2023 and 2025, a gain the company attributed in part to efficiencies from artificial intelligence. And Bending Spoons spends comparatively little to bring in new users: organically acquired customers—those who sign up without being drawn in by paid marketing—generated 79% of new-customer revenue in 2025, while advertising expenses amounted to 6% of revenue for the year.
Because Bending Spoons operates a platform of many apps rather than a single product, AI capability is built once—for engineering, support, hiring, pricing or product analytics—to be reused across its businesses. The company said the share of pull requests, or proposed changes to its software, that were authored or co-authored by AI rose from under 10% in the first quarter of 2025 to more than 90% a year later, with about 70% written entirely by AI.
Founded in 2013 and led by co-founder and CEO Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons has assembled a portfolio of more than 50 companies. Ten businesses—AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Harvest, komoot, Remini, StreamYard, Vimeo, and WeTransfer—generated more than 80% of revenue in the first quarter of 2026. Rather than building products from scratch, the company acquires established apps it believes are underperforming, then reworks their pricing, features, and operations—a model closer to that of a private equity firm than a traditional software developer.
Self-taught chef Tom Colicchio told Fortune recently that he received about a 15x return when he first invested in the company, saying, “Bending Spoons covered everything else that I’ve done, and then some.” And despite the cutlery in its name, the company said it chose “Bending Spoons” as a nod to the idea of bending a spoon with the mind, the feat popularized by The Matrix, to signal a belief in pushing past limits.
A successful listing would mark one of the most prominent U.S. debuts yet for a European technology company, and a public-market test of whether Bending Spoons’ buy-and-rebuild strategy can keep compounding once it faces the scrutiny of quarterly earnings. It joins a crowded 2026 IPO calendar, dwarfed by U.S. debuts such as SpaceX, which priced this month at roughly $1.77 trillion while seeking to raise $75 billion, and Anthropic, which filed confidentially at a $965 billion valuation.
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