A 13-year-old Italian software company just pulled off one of the most surprising IPOs of 2026. Bending Spoons, the Milan-based firm that has been quietly buying up beloved but broken internet brands for over a decade, went public on the Nasdaq on July 1st at an $18 billion valuation. By the time the closing bell rang, shares had surged 40% above the IPO price, pushing its market cap to $25.7 billion. The company raised $1.68 billion in the offering.
Its co-founder Matteo Danieli sat down with TechCrunch after the debut and explained the philosophy behind the whole operation: obsessively reduce the role luck plays in your success. “We developed an obsession for finding a strategy that would, as much as possible, reduce the role that luck plays in growth and success,” Danieli told TechCrunch.
What This Actually Means
Bending Spoons is not a flashy AI startup that raised a billion dollars on a pitch deck and a dream. It built its business by doing the unsexy work: acquiring distressed brands that users already loved, like Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo, Meetup, WeTransfer, and AOL, then cutting bloat, shipping better features, and raising prices strategically. They held the companies instead of flipping them. They focused on talent above everything else. And they used data and experimentation relentlessly to price their products.
The result? Revenue per full-time employee climbed from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, according to the company’s SEC filing. That is not a typo. That is what operational discipline looks like at scale. For context, Bending Spoons reported $601 million in revenue for Q1 2026 alone, with $27.4 million in net income. One year earlier, on just $259 million in revenue, it was still losing $112 million.
TechCrunch noted that many VCs refused to fund them for years. “We’ve got a lot of ‘you’re crazy’ reactions throughout the years,” Danieli recalled. The company’s tagline captures it well: Impossible. Maybe.
The Numbers Behind It
This story fits into a bigger picture that every entrepreneur should be paying attention to right now. According to Crunchbase, US startup funding hit $87 billion in Q1 2026 alone. Capital is moving. But the companies that actually reach an IPO at a $25 billion market cap are not the ones who got lucky on a trend. They are the ones who built systems that compounded over years.
Bending Spoons also proves that the “buy, fix, hold” model can outperform the VC-backed build-from-scratch approach when executed with rigor. Their revenue per employee figure alone should make every founder rethink their hiring and retention strategy. According to Gallup research, highly engaged employees deliver 23% greater profitability than disengaged ones. Bending Spoons made talent identification a core competency from year one. Co-founder Luca Ferrari reportedly spent the first two to three years of the company focused almost entirely on culture and hiring processes.
For comparison, the SBA reports that 33.2 million small businesses operate in the United States today. The vast majority will never raise outside capital. That makes the operational playbook here even more relevant: you do not need VC money to build a machine. You need systems, discipline, and a commitment to reducing reliance on luck.
The Hustler’s Library Take
Most founders spend their early years chasing product-market fit and hoping the timing is right. Bending Spoons did something different: they built their model around the assumption that luck is unreliable, and then engineered around that assumption for 13 years straight. That is not a startup mindset. That is a business mindset. And it made five Italian co-founders billionaires.
The lesson is not “go buy struggling software companies.” The lesson is that systems beat hustle, data beats intuition, and holding onto great assets long-term beats flipping for a quick exit. Whether you are running a small business navigating growing pains or a startup that just closed its first round, the Bending Spoons philosophy applies: build processes that keep working whether or not the market cooperates.
The company also proves that operational excellence has always been the real moat. QuikTrip and Aldi figured this out in retail. QuikTrip became America’s favorite convenience store not by being first, but by obsessing over execution. Bending Spoons just did the same thing with software acquisitions.
What You Should Do
1. Audit your luck dependency. What parts of your business only work when conditions are perfect? Low pricing power, no recurring revenue, over-reliance on one channel. These are luck dependencies. Fix them before the market forces you to.
2. Track revenue per employee. Bending Spoons uses this as a core KPI. You should too. If your revenue per head is not growing year over year, something is wrong with either your pricing or your team structure. Use financial ratios to run a smarter business and catch these signals early.
3. Hire for upside, not credentials. Ferrari’s approach was to spot talented people early, before they had a great track record. This is a competitive advantage most businesses ignore. If you are looking for investors who share this mindset, start with angel investors who back founders, not resumes.
4. Read the SEC filing. Seriously. Bending Spoons’ F-1 filing includes a chapter titled “AI before it was cool” and an entire section on their philosophy around luck and operational excellence. It is one of the most honest documents a public company has ever filed. Read it like a textbook.
5. Think long. Bending Spoons has no plans to sell its portfolio companies. Ever. That kind of patience is rare. But it is also what allows a company to grow revenue per employee by 130% in two years. Long-term thinking is still a massive competitive advantage in a world that is obsessed with quarterly results. If you are still reading about how other founders are raising millions and wondering when it is your turn, maybe the better question is: what would you do if you had to build this without ever selling?
Bending Spoons is proof that the slow, disciplined, unsexy path can produce a $25 billion outcome. The founders were called crazy for a decade. They kept building anyway.
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