Bending Spoons and Investors Raised $1.68 Billion in IPO of Vimeo Owner

Italian company Bending Spoons SpA, which specializes in buying struggling software services, together with some of its shareholders raised $1.68 billion in an initial public offering in the United States — the offering price exceeded the upper boundary of the stated price range, Bloomberg reports.

What Is Known About the Deal

• Total amount of funds raised — $1.68 billion
• Shares in the IPO were sold by both the company itself and some existing shareholders
• Final offering price exceeded the upper boundary of the stated price range — a sign of increased investor demand
• Bending Spoons is the parent company of video hosting service Vimeo

What Bending Spoons Does

Bending Spoons was founded in 2013 in Milan and built a business model around acquiring and "rehabilitating" well-known but stagnating software services: the company buys products with large existing audiences, reduces costs, and redirects monetization toward subscriptions. At different times, the portfolio included note-taking service Evernote, file transfer platform WeTransfer, meeting organization service Meetup, and streaming tool StreamYard. One of the most notable assets remains Remini — an application for image enhancement and restoration based on artificial intelligence, which has become a viral hit on social networks multiple times.

Later, video hosting service Vimeo was also added to the portfolio, which was previously owned by media company IAC and traded independently on the stock exchange as a separate public company for several years before being acquired by Bending Spoons.

What AI Has to Do with It

Although Bending Spoons itself is not a developer of large language models, artificial intelligence is embedded in one of the company's most recognizable products: Remini uses computer vision models for upscaling and restoring old or low-quality photos, which has repeatedly ranked the app among the top stores worldwide.

Before going public, Bending Spoons was financed for many years by major private equity funds and was already among the most expensive technology companies in Europe not tied to a single product but built around a portfolio of applications and services.

Why Investors Overpaid for Shares

An IPO price above the stated range usually means the order book turned out to be oversubscribed: institutional investors were willing to pay more than the organizers of the offering initially assumed. For a company like Bending Spoons, which consistently expanded its portfolio of recognizable consumer applications through a series of acquisitions, such a result is a signal of market confidence in the "acquisition and rehabilitation" business model itself for software services, not just in individual products like Vimeo or Remini. It is also a way to test the appetite of the public market for holding companies that grow through buying other people's products rather than developing their own from scratch.

Many major technology IPOs in recent years are structured so that founders retain control of the company even after going public — typically through multiple share classes with different voting rights. Whether such a structure applies in Bending Spoons' case, Bloomberg does not clarify.

What This Means

Placement above the stated range indicates that investors positively assess Bending Spoons' model — a combination of classic software business of acquiring and rehabilitating services with individual products where artificial intelligence becomes a real driver of user demand and revenue.