Soon, you can grab piece of the old internet

Bending Spoons, an Italian company that buys ageing internet companies, went public this week, giving it a market value of $25.7 billion, writes Erin Griffith from San Francisco

- ERIN GRIFFITH

America Online merged with Time Warner in 2001 in a deal worth $165 billion. This year, what remains of AOL was sold to an Italian company called Bending Spoons for $1.5 billion.

The most surprising part is not that AOL is still alive and making $633 million a year, but that it is going public alongside a stable of other ageing internet brands.

Bending Spoons, AOL's new owner, has been buying older tech companies, many with familiar names like Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Brightcove and Eventbrite. This week, the company raised as much as $1.68 billion in an initial public offering on the Nasdaq stock exchange that gave it a market value of $25.7 billion.

Bending Spoons’ strategy is far from the frenzied swirl around hot, highly valued companies building artificial intelligence. The AI boom has turbocharged expectations of success in an industry that was already obsessed with the new and next, leading to a series of blockbuster IPOs. Elon Musk’s SpaceX recently broke records with its $1.77 trillion listing, and investors are eagerly anticipating the market debuts of Anthropic and OpenAI.

Companies no longer on a rocket ship of hypergrowth are typically left behind in that narrative. But Bending Spoons is showing there is still value to be had in old internet names. The company’s playbook often involves quickly cutting employees who worked on the internet services, raising prices and then dispatching its army of young, Milan-based engineers to improve the products to kick-start growth.

“Our idea is to be a hybrid between a private equity firm and Google,” Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons’ chief executive, said in a 2024 interview. “It's like they had a baby.”

(Mr Ferrari declined to comment for this article, citing the quiet period ahead of its listing.)