- Lead. Bending Spoons, the Milan-based company that built a portfolio of 500 million monthly users by acquiring and restructuring consumer apps including AOL, Vimeo and Evernote, priced its IPO at $29 per share on June 30 and surged 39.7% to close at $40.50 on its first trading day, July 1, on Nasdaq.
- Fact. The offering — led by Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Allen & Company — raised $1.68 billion from 57.97 million shares, giving Bending Spoons a market capitalisation of roughly $25 billion at close.
- Stake. The debut is the largest European tech IPO in several years and arrives as 2026’s IPO market has raised $34.2 billion through May — up 163.9% from the prior year — on track to approach the 2021 peak of roughly $250 billion.
Bending Spoons began trading under the ticker BSP on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on July 1, 2026. The company, co-founded in Copenhagen in 2013 and since relocated to Milan, describes its strategy as a continuous loop: acquire digital businesses, implement deep operational transformations, expand earnings sustainably, and reinvest in additional acquisitions. As of March 2026, it served more than 500 million monthly active users and 9 million paying customers, according to the prospectus. Major holdings include AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, Eventbrite, StreamYard, Harvest, komoot, Remini and WeTransfer.
Why the market paid a premium
The company offered 34.4 million new shares, with selling shareholders contributing a further 23.6 million. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Allen & Company carried an underwriter greenshoe option for 8.7 million additional shares. Bending Spoons said it will not receive proceeds from the selling shareholders’ portion of the offering.
The 40% first-day pop reflects investor appetite for a rare kind of tech story: a profitable, acquisitions-driven compounder with demonstrated ability to extract margin from legacy digital brands. Most of its portfolio — AOL, Evernote, WeTransfer — were considered distressed when acquired. Bending Spoons applied AI-assisted product consolidation and aggressive cost restructuring in each case, typically within twelve months of purchase.
By July 5, the stock had settled back to approximately $35.93, still 23.9% above its IPO price, as initial enthusiasm gave way to more measured institutional positioning.
Context: an IPO market reawakening
The Bending Spoons debut lands in a materially different IPO environment than 2024 or 2025. Renaissance Capital data shows 113 IPOs raising $34.2 billion through May 2026, a 163.9% surge in value year-on-year. The market’s recovery has been led by large-cap tech and AI-adjacent names; SpaceX’s Nasdaq listing at $135 per share set the record high-water mark for a single IPO, pulling forward institutional appetite for growth equity.
For European tech, Bending Spoons’ willingness to list in New York rather than on a European exchange continues a pattern of founders seeking deeper liquidity pools and higher valuation multiples in US markets. The company’s $25 billion market cap at close on debut day would have placed it comfortably in the top tier of European tech listings by value, had it chosen Amsterdam, London or Frankfurt instead.
What to watch
Bending Spoons has not provided formal revenue guidance in its listing documents. The next material disclosure will be its first quarterly earnings report as a public company, expected in August, when investors will look for evidence that the acquisition machine can sustain operating margins under scrutiny from public markets. Analysts will pay particular attention to Vimeo and Eventbrite, which remain under-monetised relative to their user bases, as the clearest near-term test of Bending Spoons’ transformation playbook.