BSP
GS
JPM
Wall Street’s newest software-flipper
Bending Spoons came out swinging: it priced its U.S. IPO at $29 a share, above the $26 to $28 range it had been aiming for, and raised about $1.68 billion in the process. That put the company at an eye-watering $18.4 billion valuation — a nice upgrade from the $11 billion tag from its 2025 funding round.
And because the market loves a hot debut almost as much as it loves a good acronym, shares opened their life as public-company baggage by jumping hard in regular trading and then kept flirting with gains after hours. On Wednesday night, the stock was still trending higher, which is a fancy way of saying investors are not exactly ghosting this one.
The business model: buy the laggards, fix the mess
If Bending Spoons sounds a little unusual, that’s because it is. The company has built its reputation by buying underperforming software names and trying to juice them back to life — think Vimeo, AOL, Evernote, WeTransfer, Brightcove and Meetup.
CEO Luca Ferrari basically framed the whole thing as corporate house-flipping, telling Fox Business: “We win when we improve the business we acquire.” Translation: they buy the awkward fixer-upper, send in internal task forces, and hope the renovation pays off before the plumbing gives up.
Why investors should care
For investors, this IPO is a live test of whether the market is still willing to reward software roll-ups with a turnaround story. The setup has a few moving parts:
- The upside: a proven acquisition machine, fresh capital, and a public currency for future deals.
- The risk: turnaround stories are great until the market asks, “Cool, but can you keep doing that forever?”
- The read-through: if BSP holds up, it may open the door for other software consolidators to get a warmer reception.
Big picture: this is less “boring IPO” and more “public debut of a company that treats software like a fixer-upper portfolio.” Investors tend to love that — right up until they don’t.