Bending Spoons is built on the conviction that operational excellence enables
efficient growth through acquisitions. We acquire digital businesses, implement
deep transformations and ongoing optimizations to sustainably expand earnings,
and reinvest in additional acquisitions, thereby continuing the compounding
cycle. We have executed this Playbook for more than a decade and, to date, have
not sold a material business. Our performance is driven by our
Platform — comprising our people, proprietary technologies, and proprietary
data — and reflects our intense focus on achieving exceptional talent density,
cultural strength, and technical capabilities.
Below, we describe our three-step Playbook in greater detail:
• Step 1 — Acquire. We acquire a business whose core products are digital. We
prioritize businesses that we believe we can improve significantly, that have
large revenue bases, and whose trajectories we can forecast with reasonable
confidence several years into the future, a process that involves factoring in
the risk of disruption from advances in AI. Our evaluation is analytical and
rigorous, and we are disciplined on price.
• Step 2 — Transform and optimize. We strive to envision the most successful
version of the acquired business, and work to close the gap between its
current state and that vision as quickly and completely as possible. The
transformation is typically deep and entails reorganizing teams, overhauling
technology, redesigning user interfaces, accelerating product development, and
enhancing marketing and monetization. AI is often both a central component of
our vision for the acquired business and a key tool in implementing the
transformation. Through these efforts, we seek to increase revenue and reduce
costs to drive a sustainable expansion in earnings. We then optimize the
business as part of our broader portfolio on an ongoing basis.
• Step 3 — Reinvest. We reinvest our earnings, along with contributions from
newly acquired and improved businesses and prudent levels of incremental debt,
to fund additional acquisitions, thereby continuing the compounding cycle. We
may also opportunistically raise incremental equity to accelerate growth.
Our people, proprietary technologies, and proprietary data constitute the
Platform that supports our acquisitions, transformations, and ongoing
optimizations. We have been building this Platform since our founding in 2013
and consider it our primary source of competitive advantage, one that we believe
will continue to strengthen as we grow.
• People. We have a talent-dense team of Spooners(1) who embrace a culture
emphasizing truth-seeking and extreme ownership — traits we consider critical
drivers of business performance. In 2025, we received around 800,000 job
applications to become a Spooner and, consistent with our focus on talent
density, hired 286 individuals, representing less than 0.04% of applications
received. We allocate Spooners flexibly across our portfolio, deploying
resources to areas of opportunity and reducing them where appropriate. For
example, we may assemble a task force to transform a newly acquired business,
expand an engineering team to accelerate a product initiative, or scale back
an organization by redeploying Spooners once a period of intensive change has
concluded.
• Proprietary technologies. We have engineered, and continue to refine, numerous
technologies that enable us to do more and better work with fewer resources.
Examples include a data infrastructure, a user lifetime value predictor, and a
product experimentation toolkit. Our technologies are purpose-built for our
needs and are integrated with one another, making their deployment across
acquired businesses easier and allowing them to deliver superior impact, more
rapidly. As a result, most of our businesses adopt nearly all of our
proprietary technologies. We began embedding AI within our proprietary
technologies in 2019 and continue to expand its use. As we harness AI’s
advances, we expect our proprietary technologies to become more effective in
supporting the execution of our Playbook.
• Proprietary data. Across more than 50 acquisitions and subsequent operations,
we have accumulated extensive data. Sources include our product
experimentation toolkit (3,000 experiments run in 2025) and our data
infrastructure (3.8 billion data points processed per day on average in Q1
2026). This data supports faster and more informed decision-making in both
acquisitions and operations. As AI advances and our ability to leverage
complex data at scale improves, the value of our data may increase.
Since our founding, we have endeavored to be at the cutting edge of relevant
technology. AI is no exception: For years, we have been leveraging it to enhance
products, optimize marketing and monetization, and improve productivity. Many of
our proprietary technologies incorporate AI. Our team of Spooners includes
hundreds of talented and motivated software engineers, data scientists, and AI
research engineers. We estimate that the share of pull requests(2) authored or
coauthored by AI increased from less than 10% in Q1 2025 to more than 90% by the
end of Q1 2026, with around 70% authored by AI alone. Revenue per full-time
equivalent Spooner(3) was $1.12 million in 2023, $1.64 million in 2024,
$2.57 million in 2025, and $0.97 million in Q1 2026, with AI being one of the
catalysts of productivity gains.
In our view, AI is the most transformative technology of our time, and companies
that adapt effectively may realize enormous benefits. Supported by our Platform,
Bending Spoons has an opportunity to be among these companies. We believe that,
through progress in AI, we will expand our advantage in product development,
marketing, and monetization capabilities. We also believe our productivity
advantage will widen and the scalability of our acquisition and transformation
model will improve. Finally, as many companies lack diversification and may not
be well equipped to leverage AI, certain owners’ willingness to sell could
increase, contributing to lower valuation levels and more attractive acquisition
targets.
The Platform-powered execution of our Playbook has delivered financial
performance we regard as strong. Revenue reached $1.31 billion in 2025, with a
compounded annual growth rate of 84% in 2023 through 2025. In the same year,
operating income as a percentage of revenue was 21% and Adjusted Operating
Income Margin(4) was 47%. In 2023 through 2025, the compounded annual growth
rate was not meaningful for diluted earnings (loss) per share and was 82% for
Adjusted Earnings per Share(5).
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We are still early in our journey. We see a significant opportunity to continue
compounding capital at attractive rates of return within an addressable market
that we estimate includes more than 1,000 businesses generating nearly
$400 billion in aggregate annual revenue in 2025.
(1) We define “Spooners” as team members who have successfully completed the
rigorous and selective application process to join our core team. Spooners
are allocated flexibly across the organization and may be transferred
between businesses on short notice. They are held to particularly demanding
performance standards.
(2) A “pull request” is a formal proposal to add, modify, or remove code in a
shared software repository. It allows other contributors to review, discuss,
and approve the proposed changes before they are merged into the repository.
(3) “Revenue per full-time equivalent Spooner” for a given quarter is defined as
the revenue for that quarter divided by the number of full-time equivalent
Spooners at the end of the quarter. “Revenue per full-time equivalent
Spooner” for a given twelve-month period is defined as the revenue for that
period divided by the average number of full-time equivalent Spooners at the
end of each quarter within that period.
(4) As defined in Management’s discussion and analysis of financial condition
and results of operations — Non-GAAP financial measures — Adjusted Operating
Income and Adjusted Operating Income Margin.
(5) As defined in Management’s discussion and analysis of financial condition
and results of operations — Non-GAAP financial measures — Adjusted Earnings
per Share.
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Bending Spoons ApS was founded in 2013 in Copenhagen, Denmark. We relocated our
headquarters to Milan, Italy, through a multi-step cross-border merger, pursuant
to which Bending Spoons S.r.l., an Italian limited liability company (società a
responsabilità limitata), became the surviving entity in 2015. In 2017, Bending
Spoons S.r.l. was transformed into Bending Spoons S.p.A., an Italian joint stock
company (società per azioni). The company’s duration currently ends on
December 31, 2100, and a shareholder meeting may extend this term. Bending
Spoons S.p.A. is primarily a holding company, as our operations are conducted
mainly through our subsidiaries.
Our principal executive office is located at Via Nino Bonnet 10, 20154 Milan,
Italy. The telephone number at this address is +39 02 81284093. Our website
address is www.bendingspoons.com. Our agent for service of process in the U.S.
is Bending Spoons US Inc.
