A company most people have never heard of just became one of the most valuable software listings of the year. Bending Spoons, the Milan outfit that buys unloved apps and squeezes them for profit, closed its first day on the Nasdaq at $40.50 a share on Wednesday, 1 July 2026 — roughly 40% above the $29 price it set the night before.
The pop handed the company a market value near $18.4 billion and turned a group of Italian college friends into paper billionaires. It also settled, at least for a day, a question that had split Wall Street for weeks: would American investors pay a technology multiple for a business that essentially runs a digital thrift store?
Bending Spoons priced its offering at $29, above the marketed range of $26 to $28, and sold 57,971,015 ordinary shares. That raised about $1.68 billion for the company and some of its backers, according to Bloomberg. Shares trade under the ticker BSP.
Put the valuation next to where the company sat eight months ago and the leap is hard to miss. A private funding round late last year pegged Bending Spoons at $11 billion. Wednesday’s close lifted that figure by two-thirds.
What Bending Spoons actually does
The model is deliberately unglamorous. Founded in 2013 by chief executive Luca Ferrari and four co-founders on roughly $40,000 in seed money, Bending Spoons doesn’t chase the next big thing. It buys the last big thing: established digital products that have lost their shine, then strips out cost, rebuilds the underlying technology, and runs them at scale.
The shopping list reads like a tour of the internet’s attic. Video platform Vimeo, picked up for $1.38 billion last year. File-sharing service WeTransfer. The note app Evernote. Ticketing marketplace Eventbrite. Outdoor navigation tool Komoot, the pet tracker Tractive, and (the name that gets the double-takes) AOL. Since it started, the company has absorbed more than 50 stalled apps and websites and folded them into a single operation.
That operation is profitable, which is more than many recent tech debutants can say. Bending Spoons booked $1.3 billion in revenue in 2025. Ferrari has reached for an unusual comparison to describe the mix of steady cash and software margins.
“The best of both worlds of Berkshire Hathaway and a technology company.”
Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons CEO, to Forbes
Investors clearly liked the pitch. Whether it survives contact with public-market scrutiny is a separate matter.
The bull case and the skeptics
Bears have a straightforward objection. Buying declining products is a finite game. Each acquisition needs cost cuts and a turnaround to justify the price, and the supply of fixable, cash-generating apps is not endless. A Reuters Breakingviews column published before the listing argued the offering asked buyers to suspend a fair amount of disbelief about how long that engine can keep running.
The counterargument is the one Ferrari has been making for years: predictability. Products with entrenched user bases and recurring revenue behave more like utilities than moonshots, which is exactly what makes them financeable. It’s private-equity discipline wearing a software badge, and on day one the market decided that badge was worth paying up for.
Ferrari himself is now worth more than $2 billion, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Forbes put the figure a touch higher, at $2.4 billion.
There is also a geographic footnote worth registering. A marquee European technology company chose New York over Milan for its listing, a decision that stings a Continent forever worried about losing its best companies to deeper American capital pools. Bending Spoons had signaled the plan for weeks; the market it was reaching for was never in doubt, as the company’s earlier-signaled $19 billion valuation target had made plain.
The harder test starts now. A first-day surge measures appetite for a scarce new stock; it says little about whether Bending Spoons can keep finding the right zombie apps at the right price and repeating the trick quarter after quarter. For a company built entirely on the promise that yesterday’s software still has value left in it, the market has just made a large, public bet that it does.
