Italy supports a €500 million investment for the firm that owns AOL.

      Bending Spoons has secured a loan facility of €500 million, backed by the Italian government. This guarantee is provided by SACE, Italy’s export credit agency, which is fully owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. The facility, arranged by HSBC Continental Europe, Intesa Sanpaolo, and BPER Banca, is set to mature in March 2031. The Milan-based company plans to utilize these funds for further acquisitions.

      “Our goal is to maximize long-term value per share, and we are committed to deploying capital judiciously to achieve attractive risk-adjusted returns, mainly through acquisitions,” stated Davide Scarpazza, co-chief financial officer.

      SACE's role is to promote exports and support the global expansion of Italian businesses. It oversees guarantees totaling approximately €290 billion across 200 different markets.

      Bending Spoons does not engage heavily in exporting. Instead, it acquires established digital products, revitalizes them, and retains ownership. The company's website chronologically lists its acquisitions: Evernote in January 2023, Meetup in January 2024, StreamYard in April, and WeTransfer in July, followed by Brightcove and komoot in early 2025, and Vimeo in November. AOL was acquired in January 2026, followed by Eventbrite in March.

      The majority of these companies are American, while WeTransfer is Dutch and komoot is German. Consequently, the Italian government is supporting the financing of a national champion that is purchasing foreign internet firms. This aligns with SACE’s objectives, as highlighted by its CEO Michele Pignotti, who stated that the transaction demonstrates the agency's dedication to supporting prominent Italian companies that invest in innovation, broaden their reach in global markets, and enhance the competitiveness of Italy’s innovation ecosystem.

      The SACE facility is part of a larger financing endeavor for Bending Spoons, which has also arranged €495 million in additional term loan A financing and a €490 million extension of its revolving credit facility. In total, this amounts to €1.49 billion in new and expanded financing since the second quarter began, all maturing in March 2031. The two non-guaranteed components will be allocated for general corporate needs and acquisitions.

      This borrowing is occurring after Bending Spoons recently went public. The company set its IPO price at $29 per share and concluded its offering in early July, selling nearly 58 million shares.

      European tech firms have been actively tapping into debt markets, having raised billions through euro bonds in the past year.

      Bending Spoons' strategy is atypical for a company of its size, as it claims to have never sold a significant business. Its website explicitly states that it acquires digital products "not to resell, but to own and operate for the long term." The subsequent transformation of these acquisitions is extensive. The company reorganizes teams, rewrites technology, redesigns user interfaces, and revamps monetization strategies, often placing AI at the center of these plans. It maintains proprietary systems across its portfolio for functions like lifetime value prediction, payments, marketing attribution, and data ingestion, enabling it to manage multiple consumer brands simultaneously.

      As of March 2026, these brands collectively served over 500 million monthly active users and more than 9 million paying customers.

      Examining the acquisition list reveals a trend: AOL was a defining element of the consumer internet in the 1990s, while Evernote, Vimeo, Meetup, Eventbrite, and Brightcove each characterized specific categories in the subsequent two decades. All of these are now owned by a company established in Milan in 2014, which has been refinanced with support from the Italian government.

      Europe has long been concerned about American platforms acquiring its startups; this situation represents a reversal, coinciding with a broader trend of consolidation in Europe. Milan is also gaining prominence, as evidenced by Anthropic opening an office there to cater to enterprise clients.

      An unresolved question remains: What will occur when this growth period ceases? A model reliant on debt for acquisitions is sustainable as long as those acquisitions continue to perform well. Bending Spoons now has an additional €1.49 billion in financing capacity and a five-year timeframe to put it to use.