Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari on acquiring AOL and the playbook for buying overlooked digital businesses

Summary

Luca Ferrari, co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, is building what may be the most disciplined acquirer of overlooked digital assets outside the United States. The Milan-based company, valued at $11 billion, targets digital technology businesses with "unexpressed potential" — acquiring them, rewriting code, rearchitecting infrastructure, redesigning UX, and restructuring teams before holding them permanently. It is not a fund. It buys off its own balance sheet and has never sold a business.

The AOL Deal

The acquisition of AOL — signed but not yet closed as of November 2025, with the seller being Apollo Global Management — is the highest-profile deal to date. Ferrari pushes back on the nostalgia framing. AOL today operates as a web news portal and email client with more than 30 million monthly active users and 8 million daily active users, equating to roughly one in ten Americans. Retention is strong precisely because the remaining user base is self-selected. Bending Spoons had been tracking the asset for well over a year before the process launched, consistent with its standard practice of following targets at least twelve months before bidding. Multiple private equity firms also competed. The plan post-close centers on AI-driven content recommendations and general product modernisation.

The Acquisition Playbook

Bending Spoons describes itself as 25% private equity, 75% technology company. Its M&A team is deliberately small, approximately eight to nine people, focused on pipeline, sourcing, and deal execution. The operational weight sits in the roughly 95% of staff who are software engineers, product designers, growth managers, and AI researchers. After closing, the firm deploys a task force scaled to the target's headcount — approximately 50 people for a 1,000-person company, down to around 10 for a 100-person company — spending several months embedded in the code base and across every functional team before issuing a new roadmap or restructuring the organisation. The largest acquisition to date involved roughly 1,000 employees.

Ferrari is explicit that the firm competes on price and speed, describing Bending Spoons as the highest bidder in every contested process it has entered and imposing no requirements on management teams to remain post-close.

Financial Scale and Capital Discipline

Bending Spoons expects to generate approximately $2.5 billion in revenue in 2026. No single business unit contributes more than 15% of total revenue, providing meaningful diversification against AI disruption risk in any one segment. Ferrari frames the addressable market as roughly $2 trillion in digital technology, suggesting the firm sees no near-term ceiling that would push it into adjacent categories. The Berkshire Hathaway and Procter and Gamble comparisons are ones Ferrari himself reaches for — P&G in particular as a model for shared platform infrastructure supporting fully autonomous, independently branded business units.

Take-Privates and Public Market Dynamics

Bending Spoons has completed two take-privates: Brightcove earlier in 2025 and Vimeo. Ferrari views public company acquisitions as structurally more reliable in one key respect — boards facing fiduciary scrutiny cannot easily reject a compelling premium offer the way a founder or a legacy investor anchored to an outdated valuation can. The trade-off is process uncertainty: competing bids can emerge publicly at any stage, and information control is harder given insider trading incentives around liquid stock.

Portfolio Philosophy

Cross-portfolio synergies are deliberately avoided. Despite owning Brightcove and Vimeo — both video-adjacent — Ferrari argues that forcing coordination on branding, cross-selling, or bundling destroys the autonomy and speed that makes acquired teams perform. The incremental revenue from bundling, estimated loosely at around 5%, is considered a poor trade against the cultural cost. The model depends on individual business units operating with startup-level ownership, with Bending Spoons' platform value delivered invisibly through shared engineering expertise, AI tooling, and infrastructure — not brand consolidation. Evernote is cited as a concrete example where the priority is subscriber retention and product quality, not surfacing the parent company's identity.

AI Risk Framework

On evaluating AI disruption risk in targets, Ferrari is deliberately non-predictive. Having worked on AI applications as early as 2010 — more than a decade before the technology was commercially viable — he treats timeline forecasting as structurally unreliable. The firm instead requires that every acquisition thesis include a contingency scenario where rapid disruption forces a trade of long-term health for short-term cash recovery, with the goal of at minimum breaking even. Portfolio diversification across many segments is treated as the primary structural hedge.