The Italian firm that buys old apps and fires everyone is going public at $20B
Bending Spoons owns AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, WeTransfer, Komoot, Meetup and a dozen more. Its playbook: acquire, lay off almost everyone, raise prices, repeat. Now it wants a ~$20B Nasdaq listing — on $4.36B of borrowed money.
On the same Q1 it swung to a $27.5M profit on $601M revenue (from a $112M loss a year earlier), Bending Spoons filed to list on Nasdaq as BSP at roughly a $20B valuation, $1.5B raise. Trailing revenue is $1.6B, up 95%.
The thread's diagnosis was an old one: an '80s-style junk-bond LBO house. Paying customers went from 3M to 9M and the debt pile sits at $4.36B — the model is leverage plus subscription price hikes, with 'get Komooted' now a verb for the product decline that follows each buyout.
A holding company built on acquire, fire, raise prices
Italy's Bending Spoons — the quiet owner of a startling roster of consumer software — filed for a Nasdaq IPO. The thread opened not with the financials but with dread: "They also own Komoot and I am anxiously awaiting the enshittification." A commenter listed the portfolio from Wikipedia: AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Harvest, Issuu, Komoot, Meetup, MileIQ, Remini, StreamYard, Tractive, Vimeo, WeTransfer — plus Filmic, which another reader blamed Bending Spoons for turning "overnight from one of my favorite iOS apps to something for the trash heap."
The numbers behind a ~$20B ask
The filing seeks a Nasdaq listing under the ticker BSP at roughly a $20 billion valuation, raising about $1.5 billion. The financials a commenter quoted from the filing show a sharp turn:
| Metric | Q1 2026 | Year earlier |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $601M | $259M |
| Net income | $27.5M | -$112.2M |
The trailing-twelve-month picture is steeper still: revenue of roughly $1.6 billion as of March 31, 2026, 2025 full-year revenue of $1.31 billion (up 95%), full-year 2025 operating profit of $278 million (more than double 2024's $127M), 500 million monthly active users (up from 111M in late 2023) and paying customers up from 3 million to 9 million. The number the thread fixated on: borrowings of $4.36 billion.
That debt load is the whole thesis. "They are looking for a 20Bn valuation but interest rates are at 5%? How does any of this make any sense?" asked one reader, reading the profit as roughly $100M/year against the ask.
The thread's verdict: a junk-bond LBO house wearing a SaaS costume
The puzzle several commenters raised — how a company "one or two orders of magnitude lower in revenue" pulls off billion-dollar acquisitions — got a one-word answer that the rest of the thread elaborated:
"Leverage. They're essentially an 80s style junk bond LBO house." — a commenter on the financing model
The operational playbook drew concrete receipts. A reader described it as "buy company" then "instantly lay off about everyone" and raise subscription prices, and the Komoot case became the thread's emblem — "get Komooted" is now a verb for the post-acquisition decline, with app quality that "almost immediately went down the drain." One former insider's secondhand account described an intense, geo-bracketed-pay, heavy-crunch culture punctuated by a fly-everyone-to-a-resort New Year's party.
Not everyone agreed it's pure asset-stripping. A reader who'd watched a founder interview came in expecting life-support PE and left thinking "they care and improve the products" — a take immediately challenged: "first they fire all the staff and then they 'care and improve the products'? Who… improves the product?" A more sympathetic structural read framed them as the natural buyer for SaaS that has hit its ceiling — "all businesses reach a point where they don't have significant growth potential," and Bending Spoons, like IAC or Red Ventures, is who founders sell to when they want out.
Acquisition prices, and the historical rhyme
A commenter compiled the recent deal trail: Vimeo for $1.38B, AOL for $1.5B, Eventbrite, then the layoff posts that followed — including "Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo." Older hands reached for precedent. One recalled Computer Associates folding acquired products into omnibus licenses, noting corporate IT often "has no idea how to switch vendors" once their tool is bought by a company with this model — the same trap that caught firms when VMware moved to Broadcom. Another invoked "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap; one drew a Buffett parallel to his Berkshire Hathaway buy-and-dismantle origins.
The timing is the gamble
The recurring note was that Bending Spoons is selling SaaS at the exact moment the market is souring on it. "Clever, shitty numbers and they decide to IPO at the peak of the 'actually SaaS is worthless' hype," one reader wrote. A skeptical-but-fair take split the difference: the business model "seems fairly solid" and they do improve some acquisitions, "yet the expected market valuation is way off." Strip away the Komoot grievances and the bet is narrow and legible — that recurring subscription revenue plus aggressive cost-cutting can service $4.36B of debt and still justify a $20B tag, in a market that has just decided predictable SaaS cash flows aren't worth what they used to be.
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