Bending Spoons’ Playbook: Buy Low—and Hold

Bending Spoons SpA, an Italian buy-and-hold investment and management company founded in 2013, has made a name for itself by purchasing aging technology and digital brands at significantly lower valuations than their peak prices. Bending Spoons has successfully acquired and transformed brands such as AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, and more recently, Airtable.

The company's unique business model involves buying distressed tech companies, overhauling them, and then holding them within its own umbrella for profit generation through continued operations, rather than immediate sale on the market. Since its creation, Bending Spoons has executed this strategy around 50 times, raising $1.68 billion with a current market value of $23 billion.

In the second quarter, it reported $704 million in revenue and $177 million in net income, both representing impressive increases of 126% and 171%, respectively, from the second quarter of 2025. The company's financial goal is an annualized return of 25% on invested capital, achieved through operational earnings alone, without relying on dividends or synergies from acquisitions.

Bending Spoons is owned by its founders and executives, with no available shares for trading due to a dual-class share mechanism. The company's CEO, Luca Ferrari, describes their approach as a "deep transformation" that involves substantial restructuring, not just layoffs, to improve the acquired brands' technology, products, and monetization.

This strategy allows Bending Spoons to generate strong operating leverage and improve revenue and EBITDA per employee, according to analyst Henry Ellenbogen.