The Company That Bought AOL and Vimeo Is Now Public — at an $18 Billion Valuation

MILAN — Vimeo built a video platform over two decades with engineers, product designers, and a team that understood what filmmakers needed. When Bending Spoons acquired the company in September 2025, it kept the platform and shed most of the people. The entire video team is gone. The ongoing work of maintaining and updating Vimeo’s codebase is increasingly being done by AI. Bending Spoons raised $1.68 billion on the Nasdaq on Tuesday at an $18.4 billion valuation, and the market priced that arrangement without blinking. Bending Spoons is an Italian software company, founded in Milan in 2013 by Luca Ferrari and four co-founders after their first startup failed. Its model is straightforward to describe and ruthless to execute: identify digital platforms with large user bases and declining growth, acquire them at prices that reflect their cash flow rather than their potential, cut the staff, centralize the infrastructure, and let AI handle an increasing share of the software development. The company describes this as “improving operations.” The F-1 filing it submitted to regulators before its IPO describes $78.6 million in “reorganization-related expenses” in 2025 alone. The portfolio now includes AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, and Meetup, along with roughly 50 other
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