Home Technology Bending Spoons’ Playbook: Buy Low—and Hold
Author: Andrea Fiano | Photos: Bending Spoons
How Luca Ferrari’s permanent-capital model is transforming distressed digital brands.
Is it a private equity group with a twist? An “emergency room for critically injured tech companies,” as it was described by the Financial Times ? Or is it simply a modern tech conglomerate?
How do you categorize a company that buys aging technology and digital brands—brand names like AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, and more recently, Airtable—far below their peak value, overhauls and radically transforms them with a drastic turnaround, and then keeps them under the same umbrella to invest their profits in new acquisitions?
What it is, is a buy-and-hold investment and management company.
Bending Spoons SpA, an Italian company created in 2013 and recently listed on the Nasdaq, raised $1.68 billion with a total valuation of $18.4 billion and a current market value of $23 billion, and marked a 40% pop on its trading debut. For the second quarter, it reported $704 million in revenue and $177 million in net income, up 126% and 171%, respectively, from the second quarter of 2025.
It follows a highly unusual business model: buying distressed tech companies—or tattered internet businesses—at relatively low valuations, fixing them up through layoffs and reorganization, and then holding them rather than spinning them off or selling them separately to the market, as private equity groups typically do.
Bending Spoons has executed this strategy some 50 times since its creation. Funding for its activities comes from debt and from the profits of the acquired companies: the same ones it bought at low valuations, with seemingly no competition to acquire the brand.
All this was achieved as revenues increased fourfold from $387 million in 2023 to $1.3 billion last year, during which period it made 70% of its acquisitions. Ownership’s financial goal is an annualized return of 25% on invested capital, built on operational earnings alone rather than divestments, synergies between different acquisitions, or headcount reductions.
Meanwhile, debt, which financed 70% of the acquisitions that Bending Spoons made in the first quarter of this year, continues to pile up. In the last reported quarter, total debt was more than four times annualized EBITDA: hovering, in other words, between $4.3 billion and $4.4 billion, with a net debt of nearly $3.7 billion. The Canadian company Constellation Software Inc. has a similar business model, but carries less debt on its books, while Barry Diller’s People Inc.—formerly IAC Inc.—has followed a similar business model.
Luca Ferrari, CEO and one of four co-founders of Bending Spoons, described the model as a “deep transformation” because the acquired brands do not just go through layoffs but undergo radical structural reconstruction. The company’s name, an homage to the movie The Matrix , reflects the founders’ belief that mindset can transform reality, fueling their goal to achieve milestones that others might deem impossible.
In the prospectus for its Nasdaq listing, Bending Spoons mentions 1,000 potential targets. Its latest acquisition, announced this month, is Airtable, a “collaborative work management” software company, for $1.29 billion in cash. That represents a nearly 90% discount over Airtable’s highest valuation in 2021.
“The thesis of what we do,” Ferrari said, “is to integrate these companies very d…