Bending Spoons and investors raise $1.68 billion in IPO of Vimeo's parent company

Italian company Bending Spoons SpA, which specializes in buying struggling software services, raised $1.68 billion together with some of its shareholders in a US initial public offering, Bloomberg reports. The shares priced above the top of the marketed range.

What we know about the deal

• Total proceeds came to $1.68 billion
• Both the company and some existing shareholders sold shares in the IPO
• The final offer price came in above the top of the marketed price range, a sign of strong investor demand
• Bending Spoons is the parent company of video platform Vimeo

What Bending Spoons does

Bending Spoons was founded in Milan in 2013. Its business model is to buy well-known software services that have stopped growing and turn them around: the company acquires products with a large existing user base, cuts costs, and shifts monetization toward subscriptions. Over the years, its portfolio has included note-taking service Evernote, file-transfer platform WeTransfer, event-organizing service Meetup, and streaming tool StreamYard.

One of its most prominent assets is still Remini, an AI-powered app for enhancing and restoring photos that has gone viral on social media several times. Vimeo joined the portfolio later. The video platform was previously owned by media company IAC and traded on the stock exchange as a standalone public company for several years before Bending Spoons bought it.

Where AI comes in

Bending Spoons doesn't build large language models itself, but AI powers one of its best-known products. Remini uses computer vision models to upscale and restore old or low-quality photos, and that capability has sent the app to the top of app store charts worldwide several times.

Before going public, Bending Spoons was backed for years by major private equity funds. It already ranked among Europe's most valuable tech companies, and it stands out because it isn't tied to a single product but built around a portfolio of apps and services.

Why investors paid a premium

An IPO priced above its marketed range usually means the order book was oversubscribed: institutional investors were willing to pay more than the underwriters had initially planned. For a company like Bending Spoons, which has steadily built up a portfolio of recognizable consumer apps through a series of acquisitions, this outcome signals market confidence in the "buy and turn around" model for software services itself, not just in individual products like Vimeo or Remini. It also tests the public market's appetite for holding companies that grow by buying other companies' products rather than building their own from scratch.

Many large tech IPOs in recent years have been structured so that founders keep control of the company even after listing, typically through multiple share classes with different voting rights. Bloomberg doesn't specify whether Bending Spoons uses such a structure.

What it means

Pricing above the marketed range shows that investors view Bending Spoons' model favorably. That model combines a classic software business of buying and turning around services with standalone products where AI is becoming a real driver of user demand and revenue.