In the summer of 2013, Luca Ferrari was sitting in the deserted offices of Evertale, the collapsed start-up he and two university friends had founded, searching for a name for their next venture.
Then colleague Matteo Danieli walked in with an unlikely suggestion inspired by cult classic The Matrix.
“He had watched the movie the night prior, and he’s like: why don’t we call it Bending Spoons,” said Ferrari, referring to the central idea of the film that the mind can bend the apparent rules of reality.
“We thought it actually captures some of the principles we find inspiring and believing that your mind can do a lot,” he told the FT.
“We liked the silliness of Bending Spoons as a company name,” he added in the company’s IPO prospectus. “We were about to attempt to create a world-class company with $40,000, a team of five, and a track record that read zero for one. A touch of irony seemed appropriate.”
This week, the business, which has morphed into a sprawling technology conglomerate through some 50 acquisitions, including AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo, went public, raising $1.68bn from investors.
Bending Spoons’ shares soared 40 per cent on their Nasdaq debut on Wednesday, turning Ferrari and three co-founders into billionaires, as well as minting high-profile investors including Baillie Gifford.
The Milan-based business was on Friday trading 24 per cent above the IPO price, valuing it at just under $23bn.
The listing, one of the largest by a European group in recent years, piqued investors’ interest due to the company’s business model of buying struggling internet companies, often using debt, before gutting and fixing them to accelerate growth.
The catch is that — unlike private equity — Bending Spoons does not then look to sell, but instead seeks to make returns from earnings alone.
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“Our way to generate value is to buy companies where there’s a core of greatness, whether it’s a brand, a customer base, maybe some good aspects of the products or some good aspects of the team, then rebuilding everything else to make it much, much better,” Ferrari said.
There has been criticism over Bending Spoons’ methods, which often involve mass redundancies, as well as its lack of financial disclosure, meaning it can be difficult to analyse how their companies perform after being acquired.
More than three quarters of its deals have also been struck in the past three years, leading to uncertainty about how the various elements of the conglomerate will perform in the longer term, and creating a highly leveraged company with debt of about $4.4bn.
The lack of disclosure was cited as a reason some lenders decided against extending loans to Bending Spoons, according to people familiar with the matter, with Ferrari admitting that this had been a driver in the company’s decision to go public.
“Lenders much prefer lending to public companies, especially companies trading in the US, because they’re more strictly regulated,” he said.
Ferrari, Danieli and their fellow Italian Francesco Patarnello met while studying engineering in the Danish capital Copenhagen, and came up with the diary app Evertale while backpacking in Indonesia. It raised $1mn but folded within three years — a failure Ferrari called “liberating”.
Taking the two Evertale standouts, Tomasz Greber and Luca Querella, and their remaining $40,000 with them, they founded Bending Spoons and spent a decade quietly acquiring mobile apps, aiming to build “the perfect operating machine”.
Their creation burst into Silicon Valley consciousness in 2023 when it bought struggling Evernote, a hyped note-taking app that had run into trouble amid several management shake-ups.
The deal stoked controversy when the new owners sacked hundreds of staff, including the entire US workforce, raised prices and removed features beloved by long-term users.
Yet Ferrari singled it out as the company’s standout acquisition.
“Evernote today is, literally, almost like an entirely new business,” he said. “You have almost completely rewritten technological foundations and . . . the feature set is on another planet.”
New registrations were up after several years of decline, according to Ferrari, and the app has one of the highest-paying customer retention rates of any Bending Spoons business.
Ferrari said a large part of the company’s success has been down to their 700-strong army of so-called Spooners — their term for the enthusiastic and talented young people they hire to replace laid-off staff and inject new life into tired businesses.
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The selection process is tough — fewer than 300 were recruited last year out of 800,000 applicants, according to Ferrari — and they pay well to lure top graduates who might otherwise head to hedge funds. Revenues per Spooner hit $2.57mn last year and $1mn in the first quarter of 2026.
They include Florinda Pannofino, 29, who joined as an intern and now leads both Evernote and Harvest, another portfolio company. “If you want to work hard and roll up your sleeves, no matter how long you’ve been in the company, how old you are, you’re welcome,” she told the FT.
Joe Hyrkin, former chief executive of Issuu, a publishing platform bought in 2024, defended Bending Spoons’ methods.
“There were lay-offs, but everyone got a good severance, everyone was treated fairly,” he said, adding that the new owners implemented important changes to improve Issuu’s customer offering.
“They actually enhanced the product . . . they took a number of the ideas we had in our product roadmap and implemented them,” he said.
Looking ahead, Ferrari would not be drawn on any specific potential future targets, which he said numbered 100 at any given moment.
Despite being an AI enthusiast, Ferrari said companies operating in that sector were unlikely to be on that list. Most are newly founded and already have high levels of energy and innovation, meaning Bending Spoons had less to offer them, with it set to target companies that were not “already winning”.
To fund future acquisitions, he said Bending Spoons might now favour equity deals, after previously having opted against dilution with the view that the company would be more valuable in the future.
“As a public company . . . we have more optionality . . . if a particularly appealing opportunity presents itself,” Ferrari said. “That may happen, but it wasn’t the main reason [for the IPO], it’s more the cherry on the cake.”
Ferrari accepted that a reliance on a small cohort of highly motivated employees in its Spooners to push through transformations may act as a brake on its ambitions.
Yet the Italian remains confident that the acquisitive conglomerate’s rapid growth can continue. “Certainly we want to scale more, and we’ll do the best we can to get there.”
Infographic design by Carolina Vargas
