Bending Spoons IPO: Luca Ferrari on breaking a Nasdaq record, acquiring zombie companies with AI, and $4M revenue per employee

Bending Spoons IPO: Luca Ferrari on breaking a Nasdaq record, acquiring zombie companies with AI, and $4M revenue per employee

Bending Spoons, the Milan-based digital holding company that acquires and rebuilds mature software brands, went public on Nasdaq this week. CEO Luca Ferrari brought over 500 employees to the exchange floor — a record, according to Nasdaq — and shares opened around $30–31 before closing the first day near $40.

The IPO was not primarily about raising equity capital. Ferrari says roughly 80% of the company's acquisition funding has historically come from debt, and going public was mainly a move to improve access to cheaper credit. Lenders, he notes, simply prefer public borrowers — better regulated, more transparent, easier to value. The equity upside is real but secondary: being public may open seller conversations that were previously unavailable, and Ferrari leaves open the possibility of a larger, one-off acquisition that wouldn't have been financeable as a private company. He frames that as a "cherry on the cake" rather than a strategic pivot — the core cadence stays at roughly three to eight deals a year.

“When you double the company pretty much every year for as long as I can remember, that goes a long way getting people to like you. We are over 90% of our code being written by AI and pretty modest expenditures. Revenue per Spooner went up from about $1M in 2023 to roughly $4M run rate.”

The model

Bending Spoons targets software businesses that have been around at least 15 to 16 years, survived multiple technology cycles, and have a self-selected, stable customer base. Ferrari's list includes Vimeo, Eventbrite, and AOL. The pitch to sellers is durability over disruption: these products have already lived through mobile, cloud, and competitive cloning. The AI threat, in his view, is real for many companies but more nuanced for businesses with decade-long customer relationships baked in.

The acquisition process is deliberately slow on relationship-building and fast on execution when the moment arrives. Ferrari says sellers frequently prefer Bending Spoons over financial acquirers precisely because the company never sells assets, invests genuinely in product, and allows founding teams to exit within weeks of closing rather than locking them into multi-year earnouts. Some conversations run for two years before a deal closes; others move in six weeks.

AI as an operating lever

The sharper story is what AI is doing to Bending Spoons' internal economics. Revenue per employee — what Ferrari calls "revenue per Spooner" — rose from roughly $1M in 2023 to approximately $4M on a run-rate basis. Over 90% of the company's code is now written by AI.

Ferrari traces the company's AI interest back to 2010, when he and his co-founders ran an AI startup that raised $1M and failed. Since at least 2018, Bending Spoons has been building narrow-purpose, in-house models that are cheap to run and self-hosted. The company also fine-tunes open-source models and routes tasks through a proprietary AI orchestrator that matches each job to the most cost-efficient model available. Frontier models are used selectively — for complex tasks or to supervise simpler ones — which keeps token costs low. Ferrari says there are no internal restrictions on AI usage; the discipline comes from the architecture rather than budgets.

The productivity gains matter most on the operational side, after a deal closes. The transformation work — rebuilding teams, tooling, and product — is the real bottleneck to doing more acquisitions per year, and AI is expanding that capacity.

Vimeo

Ferrari is unusually direct about Vimeo's creative community, acknowledging it has been frustrated by the company's pivot toward enterprise. He says Bending Spoons has "some surprises in store" for that audience and sees genuine potential to re-engage them — though he stops short of embedding any brand revival into the investment thesis.

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The through-line across the IPO, the acquisition pipeline, and the AI buildout is the same bet Ferrari has been making for years: hire exceptional people, give them powerful tools, and compound quietly. The $4M revenue-per-employee figure is the clearest evidence of whether that bet is working.