Luca Ferrari net worth
Luca Ferrari has said Bending Spoons operates like 'the best of both worlds of Berkshire Hathaway and a technology company.' YT/ The Italian CEO and Marcello Ascani

Bending Spoons floated on the Nasdaq on 1 July, and the listing valued the Milan software company at about $18.4B (£13.9B) and left co-founder and chief executive Luca Ferrari with a personal fortune of roughly $2.4B (£1.8 B), according to Forbes.

The company priced its shares at $29 (£22), above the marketed range of $26 to $28, and raised about $1.68B (£1.3B). The stock rose sharply on its trading debut. It was the largest listing by a European startup since 2023.

Ferrari's three co-founders, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli, and Luca Querella, hold stakes that take the quartet's combined worth to about $8.9B (£6.7B). Backers in line for a payday include the British asset manager Baillie Gifford, whose holding is valued at $1.2B (£910M).

How Bending Spoons Turned Old Apps Into Billions

Founded in 2013, Bending Spoons has bought more than 50 stalled apps and websites and folded them into one business that generated $1.31B (£990M) in revenue in 2025. The portfolio includes AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, and Meetup, which together reach more than 500 million monthly users and nine million paying subscribers as of March 2026. Ferrari has described the company as 'the best of both worlds of Berkshire Hathaway and a technology company.'

The company follows a consistent method. It buys apps with steady revenue but slowing growth, rebuilds their technology, and cuts costs. That has often meant job losses. Filings show it spent more than $78M (£59M) on reorganisation in 2025 after taking on 1,830 staff through its AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo deals, and expects only a few hundred to remain by the end of 2026.

Customers have also faced steep price rises. After buying Evernote for $200M (£152M) in 2023, the company raised the note-taking app's annual price from $100 (£76) to $249 (£189), with business users charged more. Users of Vimeo and WeTransfer saw similar increases. Bending Spoons told investors that 48 per cent of its subscription revenue came from customers who had stayed at least five years.

'We want to place ourselves as an operator that takes beloved brands and makes them much better,' co-founder Matteo Danieli told TechCrunch.

The Debt Behind the Bending Spoons Fortune

The buying has been financed largely with borrowing. A $5B (£3.8B) acquisition run since 2023, including the $1.45B (£1.1B) purchase of AOL last year, has left about $6B (£4.5B) of debt on the balance sheet.

Interest payments reached $143M (£108M) last year, roughly half of the company's $278M (£211M) in operating income. Bending Spoons recorded a net loss of about $200,000 in 2025.

Much of the growth has come from acquisitions rather than existing products. Half of revenue now comes from AOL, and organic growth was 13 per cent in 2025.

The debut also lands during a sharp sell-off in software and buyout stocks. Shares in Constellation Software, the Canadian consolidator often compared with Bending Spoons, have fallen more than 44 per cent over the past year. Ferrari has said the timing does not worry him. 'We are thinking 10 or 20 years out,' he said.

Artificial intelligence underpins the plan. Ferrari says he aims to buy three to five companies a year and rebuild them with AI, which now writes about 90 per cent of the company's code, up from under a tenth a year earlier. That has helped lift revenue per employee to $2.57M (£1.95M) in 2025, which the company says beats Apple's $2.4M (£1.8M). 'We are a technology company at our core,' Ferrari said.

The company began in 2013 after Ferrari and his co-founders, friends from their studies in Italy and Denmark, failed to build a journaling app. They named the business after a scene in The Matrix and bought their first product, a keyboard app, for $10,000 (£7,600).

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