On 1 July, a Milan-based company most software founders could not have named two years ago listed on the Nasdaq at $29 a share (€25.30 / R475), raised €1.47 billion (R27.5 billion), and closed its first day up roughly 40% at $40.50 (€35.32 / R664). At its peak, the market briefly valued Bending Spoons (owner of AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and more than 50 other apps) at around €22.4 billion (R421 billion). That is more than double the €9.6 billion (R180 billion) private valuation it carried as recently as October 2025.
Here is the part that should make every SaaS operator sit up: the company behind one of the most successful tech IPOs of 2026 does not build software. It buys software the rest of the industry has written off. Products past their hype cycle, past their growth story, still breathing, still billing. Call it what it is: the zombie SaaS economy. And the public market just told us that economy is worth tens of billions of dollars.
The buy-cut-run playbook
The model is brutally consistent. Bending Spoons acquires digital products with large, loyal user bases and inefficient cost structures. Then it executes the same restructuring cycle every time: deep workforce cuts, technology modernisation, price increases, free-tier restrictions, and centralisation of operations to Milan.
The numbers are not subtle. The company paid €68.6 million (R1.29 billion) in reorganisation-related expenses in 2025 after absorbing roughly 1,830 staff from its AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo acquisitions, and expects only a few hundred of them to remain by the end of 2026. Evernote subscribers who paid around €87 (R1,640) a year before the 2023 acquisition now pay €217 (R4,080). Vimeo’s layoffs after the deal closed reached most of the workforce, including the entire video team.
The result: €1.14 billion (R21.5 billion) in revenue in 2025, more than 500 million monthly active users, and over 9 million paying customers across the portfolio. It looks like private equity with one important difference: Bending Spoons keeps the brands and operates them, indefinitely. This is not a flip. It is a harvest.
And the pipeline is growing. The IPO filing identifies more than 1,000 potential acquisition targets, a list that gets longer every quarter as venture capital concentrates in AI and leaves a generation of mature software companies with nowhere to refinance.
What venture orthodoxy gets wrong
Venture-backed SaaS is priced on growth. Rule of 40, net-new ARR, category creation, the next round’s story. That is the orthodoxy, and every board deck in the industry is built around it.
Bending Spoons pays for none of it. It pays for retention: users who keep showing up and keep paying long after the growth story has died. Consider what an Evernote subscriber in 2026 actually represents: a user who survived years of product neglect, a 149% price increase, and a shrinking free tier, and stayed anyway. That is not a growth metric. That is habit, workflow lock-in, and switching costs doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
The uncomfortable arithmetic is this: a software company can lose its narrative, most of its team, and all of its category buzz, and still be worth billions, provided its retention curve flattens instead of collapsing. The market has now put a public, tradeable price on that fact. Roughly €15.7 billion (R295 billion) at the IPO print, and closer to €21.8 billion (R410 billion) by the closing bell.
What this means if you are a founder eyeing an exit
The buyer pool for software companies has structurally changed. If your business is growing 80% a year, nothing here applies to you. For everyone else (the far larger group running solid products with slowing growth), the marginal buyer increasingly looks like Bending Spoons, and that changes how you should think about the next three years.
First, your retention curve is your valuation. A buy-and-operate acquirer will diligence your cohort data far harder than your roadmap. Flat, old cohorts that still pay are the asset. Everything else is commentary.
Second, operational bloat is a discount, not a moat. When the buyer’s entire model is cutting your cost structure, your inefficiency becomes their upside, which means you sell cheaper than you should. Every unnecessary layer you carry into a sale process is value you are transferring to the acquirer.
Third, untested pricing is a gift to your buyer. Evernote’s price rise happened after the sale, which means the sellers got paid on the old number. If you have never seriously tested your pricing, someone else will eventually run that experiment and keep the proceeds.
The conclusion is not that every founder should slash and burn. It is that the discipline Bending Spoons applies after an acquisition (honest cost structure, real pricing power, retention as the primary metric) is available to you now, while you still own the equity that benefits from it.
Boring retention beats flashy acquisition
Step back and the zombie SaaS economy has a simple origin story: thousands of software companies spent a decade buying users they never learned to keep profitably. Acquisition got the budget, the dashboards, and the headcount. Lifecycle, onboarding, pricing architecture, and churn analysis got whatever was left. When the growth capital stopped, the companies that had outsourced their economics to the next funding round became inventory.
Retention is unglamorous in exactly the way that matters. It compounds quietly, it is dramatically cheaper than acquisition, and its levers (onboarding that lands, lifecycle communication driven by real customer data, pricing that reflects value delivered) rarely make for exciting board slides. But they are the difference between a company that commands a premium and a company that gets harvested.
Bending Spoons is, in effect, the clean-up crew for software’s first act, and it is billing €1.14 billion (R21.5 billion) a year for the service. The second act will belong to the companies that take retention as seriously in year two as they took acquisition in year one. The IPO was not an anomaly. It was an invoice, addressed to every SaaS business still confusing growth with value.
Blaque Software helps SaaS businesses build the systems that make retention compound: lifecycle marketing, CRM architecture, pricing and measurement frameworks, and growth strategy. If your growth engine acquires users faster than it keeps them, let’s talk.