Bending Spoons, the owner of AOL and other legacy Internet brands, is going public

America Online merged with Time Warner in 2001 in a deal valued at $165 billion. This year, what was left of AOL was sold to an Italian company called Bending Spoons for $1.5 billion.

The most surprising part isn’t that AOL is still alive and kicking in $633 million a year, but that it’s about to go public alongside a stable of other aging Internet brands.

Bending Spoons, the new owner of AOL, is buying up legacy tech companies, many with household names like Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Brightcove and Eventbrite. This week, the company plans to raise up to $1.62 billion in a Nasdaq-listed initial public offering that could value it at up to $19 billion.

Bending Spoons’ strategy is far from frantically swirling around hot, highly valued AI companies. The AI ​​boom has fueled expectations of success in an industry already obsessed with the new and the next, leading to a series of blockbusters. Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO recently broke records with its $1.77 trillion entry, and investors are eagerly anticipating the launch of Anthropic and OpenAI.

Companies that are no longer on the hyper-growth rocket ship are usually left behind in this story. But Bending Spoons shows that there is still value in old internet names. The company’s playbook often includes rapidly cutting the number of employees who worked on Internet services, raising prices, and then sending an army of young engineers from Milan to improve products and jump-start growth.

“Our idea is to be a hybrid between a private equity firm and Google,” Luca Ferrari, chief executive of Bending Spoons, said in an interview in 2024. “It’s like having a baby.”

(Mr. Ferrari declined to comment for this article, citing a quiet period before his induction.)

Bending Spoons isn’t the only company chasing technological catches. Constellation Software, a Canadian company with annual revenues of $11.6 billion, specializes in the acquisition of business-oriented software and technology companies. A Los Angeles company called MediaLab, run by Michael Heyward, founder of the anonymous social media app Whisper, has bought the assets of Imgur, an image-sharing site; Kik, a messaging app; and Genius, a music lyrics site.

Since its inception in 2013, Bending Spoons has acquired over 50 companies. It generated $1.3 billion in revenue last year and swung to a net loss of around $200,000. His strategy has angered some former employees and customers, who say Internet companies were doing well before Bending Spoons came along and gutted them.

Mr. Ferrari said in 2024 that his company makes drastic, sometimes painful changes to the businesses it buys, all for the betterment of them. “If someone doesn’t want to see any change, we’re not a good buyer,” he said.

At the moment, Bending Spoons has a lot of potential business. Traditional software stocks have taken a beating as investors fear AI disruption, and many venture capitalists have shifted their focus to AI. That leaves fewer options for the generation of start-ups and tech companies that started before the AI ​​boom. Bending Spoons has a list of more than 1,000 potential acquisitions, it said in its IPO.

“These are not walking dead companies,” said Joe Hyrkin, who sold his digital publishing platform Issuu to Bending Spoons in 2024. Venture capitalists simply aren’t interested in them anymore, he added.

Kerry Trainor, founder of Creator Partners, the investment firm that backed Bending Spoons in 2022, said that well-known brands, even in the digital age, had a deeper connection with their audience than people might think. Some brands will be replaced by artificial intelligence, he noted, but many others will simply adapt.

“Markets often turn towards the assumption that everything is going to be replaced,” he said.

Bending Spoons grew out of a failed digital diary app that Mr. Ferrari started with some engineer friends in 2010. The Evertale app flopped.

The group decided to use their leftover money and engineering skills to improve digital products that had already found an audience, paying $10,000 to buy a digital keyboard app and using the profits to buy more apps. She named her holding company after the idea of ​​”mind bending spoons,” a concept popularized by a scene in “The Matrix.”

Eventually, Bending Spoons’ deals became so large that the company obtained outside financing and took on debt to continue making purchases.

The growth of Bending Spoons has attracted technical talent to Milan. The company is placing young, inexperienced people with “high potential,” known as “Spooners,” in positions of major responsibility, according to its filing. Last year, it accepted 286 people out of 800,000 applications, it said.

Sriram Krishnan, an investor at venture capital firm Kearny Jackson, met the founders of Bending Spoons in 2022. He invested and offered to introduce his network of contacts to the founders. But most of them were skeptical about bending spoons, he said.

That year, Bending Spoons bought the note-taking app Evernote. Founded in 2004, Evernote was one of the first app companies to take off alongside the rise of smartphones. He was so popular in Silicon Valley that fans would show up at the company’s headquarters to check out the gift shop in his lobby. However, over time, its growth slowed and it went through a series of failed turnarounds.

Bending Spoons’ deal to acquire Evernote has caught the attention of the tech industry. The Spooners quickly closed Evernote’s Silicon Valley office, laid off most of the staff, and changed the app’s pricing. They also upgraded the app technology, added features and attracted new users. This led to an increase in sales in the first two years of ownership, before sales fell slightly last year.

Suddenly, Mr. Krishnan said, venture capitalists wanted an introduction to bending spoons. The AI ​​boom was gaining momentum, and many found themselves with aging companies they needed to sell.

“The tide turned very quickly,” he said.

Bending Spoons went on to buy well-known US start-ups, including events company MeetUp, file-sharing company WeTransfer and online video service Brightcove.

When Mr. Hyrkin decided to sell Issuu, a digital publishing company founded in 2006, he worried that a buyer might leave its customers in the lurch. He appreciated Bending Spoons’ promise never to sell its properties.

Knowing that Bending Spoons was likely to lay off most of Issuu’s 150 employees, Mr. Hyrkin negotiated a larger severance package and sufficient warning as part of a “low nine-figure” deal, he said.

Bending Spoons later upgraded some of Issuu’s tools and removed the pricing plan, moving customers to a more expensive pricing tier with more features. Mr. Hyrken said he wanted to make similar changes as CEO, but felt he couldn’t because it might jeopardize certain milestones that potential investors or acquirers cared about.

When Bending Spoons bought live streaming service StreamYard in 2024, the company’s employees were devastated. Nic Taylor, StreamYard’s former product manager, said he thought he would work there for many years — maybe even the rest of his career.

“I used to go to conventions in a StreamYard T-shirt and people would really want to hug you,” he said. Most were released after the sale. Geige Vandentop, one of StreamYard’s founders, said in a statement that watching Bending Spoons cut staff, raise prices and upset users has been “brutal.”

So when Bending Spoons bought the video hosting service Vimeo the next year, Mr. Taylor and StreamYard’s founders saw an opportunity to push back. Vimeo customers have speculated that the service might raise prices. StreamYard’s founders have poured $10 million into a new video hosting company called Livid, which offers a free tool to let people migrate their video libraries from Vimeo. “Vimeo makes it hard to leave,” Livid said. Its tool has been downloaded more than 10,000 times to export a quarter of a million videos, the company said.

In September, AOL shut down its dial-up Internet service, which first launched in 1989. The company now makes money by selling ads and subscriptions for things like malware protection and technical support to its 30 million monthly users. The next month, Bending Spoons announced it would buy AOL from its private owner for $1.5 billion, its biggest deal to date.

In a statement at the time, Mr. Ferrari praised AOL as “an iconic, beloved business that is in good health.”

Soon after the deal closed in January, layoffs began.