The company that defined the early 1990s internet revolution is headed for the Nasdaq this week. Yes, AOL is returning to Wall Street.
Bending Spoons, an Italian firm that bought AOL in January, is on tap to begin trading Wednesday under the ticker symbol BSP.
The company has built a digital media conglomerate via a series of acquisitions, including video sites Brightcove and Vimeo, ticket platform Eventbrite and to-do list app Evernote.
It is looking to raise nearly $1.6 billion through the sale of 58 million shares at a price range of $26 to $28. At the $27 midpoint, Bending Spoons would be worth just over $18 billion.
At that market valuation, the company would be trading at seven times trailing revenue. That's a slight premium to the trailing price-to-sales ratio of about 6.7 for Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms and a discount to the more than 10 times price-to-sales ratio for Google and YouTube owner Alphabet.
AOL, of course, has been public before. The company, known for its yellow running man logo, made its stock market debut in 1992 (as America Online) back when dial-up modems and instant messaging from your desktop computer were cutting edge technologies. The company bought Time Warner in early 2001, a deal that is now considered one of the worst corporate mergers of all time.
AOL was subsequently spun off from Time Warner in 2009. It was bought by Verizon in 2015. The telecom eventually sold AOL and other digital media businesses (including Yahoo!) to private-equity firm Apollo Global Management in 2021. Apollo then completed its sale of AOL to Bending Spoons earlier this year.
But Bending Spoons hopes it can revitalize AOL. The company is also telling investors that even more deals are likely. Bending Spoons said in its regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it plans to favor returns over organic growth and that it is looking to bring "established businesses back to start-up mode."
The Bending Spoons IPO filing is a lot quirkier than most company prospectuses, which are typically laden with jargon and legalese sections. Instead, Bending Spoons concedes its practices are unusual and won't be embraced by every investor.
That might include the company's propensity to take on leverage to finance many of its deals. Bending Spoons said in its SEC filing that it has about $4.4 billion in long-term debt. This could be particularly problematic if interest rates rise, which could increase its servicing costs.
Investors may also balk at the fact that Bending Spoons is barely profitable. Although the company generated revenue of $2.6 billion last year, a pro forma figure that includes AOL and its other recently acquired businesses, it posted a profit of only $22.4 million. So net margins were tiny, at less than 1%. For the first quarter of 2026, Bending Spoons reported revenue of $601.3 million and a net profit of $27.5 million.
And then there's that strange-sounding corporate name. Bending Spoons is a reference to the use of illusions to make it look like a metal spoon is actually bending. The company said in its regulatory filing the name serves as a metaphor for ideas dear to it, such as attempting the seemingly impossible and pursuing bold objectives.
The firm also conceded in the SEC filing that it liked the silliness of using Bending Spoons as a company name, noting that when it was founded in 2013, it had $40,000 and five employees, and a "touch of irony seemed appropriate."
That's all well and good. But the company will need to rely on more than a sense of humor and nostalgia to convince investors to buy the stock. Wall Street prefers tangible results over magic tricks. "You've got Bending Spoons!" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, either.
Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 30, 2026 01:00 ET (05:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.