Bending Spoons rises over 12% in Nasdaq debut as valuation hits $18.5 billion

IPO pricing and first-day trading

Bending Spoons priced its initial public offering at $29 per share, exceeding the initial $26 to $28 range, raising $1.68 billion in total proceeds. The offering comprised 57.97 million ordinary shares, with approximately 34.4 million new shares from the company and 23.6 million sold by existing shareholders. Greenshoe options for over 8.6 million additional shares were also granted. Trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker BSP began on 1 July, with shares opening at $31 and touching an intraday high of $38, before settling around a 12% gain above $32. The closing of the offering is expected on 2 July.

A hybrid business model

Bending Spoons operates at the intersection of a software house and a private equity fund. The company acquires digital businesses, restructures them through cost-cutting and deep technological overhauls, often leveraging AI, and then holds them for long-term growth rather than flipping them for a quick profit. Its portfolio includes well-known names such as Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup, Brightcove, Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite, acquired in deals spanning over 50 transactions. The prospectus filed with the SEC identified more than 1,000 digital companies as potential future targets.

This is certainly an important indicator for the software sector, though it partly depends on the scarcity of new listings in the industry. Bending Spoons, however, has a very different profile compared to most software companies awaiting their stock market debuts.

Italian backers and Milan market reaction

Tamburi Investment Partners (Tip), an early shareholder in Bending Spoons, saw its own shares climb 8.69% to €9.51 on the Milan exchange following the Nasdaq debut. Tip will collect over $50 million from the IPO while retaining about a 2.5% holding. Giovanni Tamburi, the investment firm’s founder, explained that the sale was partly a signal to the market, and that he remains confident the stock will perform well.

We decided to sell some shares to give a signal to the market, to show movement. We are keeping more than 80% of the shares; we are convinced the stock will do very well in the future.

Separately, Italy’s undersecretary for the economy, Federico Freni, pushed back against suggestions that the choice of Nasdaq over Milan’s Piazza Affari represented a defeat for the country, describing the listing structure.

A test for software IPOs amid AI jitters

The IPO is the first sizable software listing in the United States this year, a period marked by investor caution over whether generative AI could disrupt traditional software business models. While the broader US IPO market raised over $100 billion in the second quarter (boosted by mega-deals like SpaceX), software companies had largely stayed on the sidelines, making Bending Spoons’ performance a closely watched barometer for the sector.