Bending Spoons, an Italian conglomerate that recently bought AOL, is the surprise stock success story of the summer. Shares are up almost 75% from their initial public offering price. Take that, SpaceX!

The company, which also owns Vimeo, Brightcove, Eventbrite and Evernote, is looking to buy digital media and software companies that have fallen on hard times, with the hopes of cutting costs and improving efficiencies to boost revenue and earnings.

Along those lines, Bending Spoons announced its first post-IPO acquisition earlier this month, buying software company Airtable for about $1.3 billion. That's a steep discount to Airtable's peak valuation of $11.7 billion following the post-Covid boom for software companies in 2021.

So you can't accuse Bending Spoons of overpaying for assets. But the company, which will report its first quarterly earnings since the IPO on Thursday, is looking increasingly risky. Not to mention expensive.

The stock is now trading at 43 times earnings estimates for this year. To put that in comparison, Google owner Alphabet, Facebook/Instagram parent Meta Platforms and Microsoft trade for about 17, 18 and 25 times this year's earnings forecasts respectively. Bending Spoons also trades at a premium to digital content company Reddit, which is valued at 29 earnings estimates for 2026.

Analysts are expecting that Bending Spoons will report revenue of $683 million for the second quarter and earnings per share of 27 cents. But given how much the stock has run up since its early July debut, Bending Spoons may need to substantially beat those estimates to justify further gains.

Wall Street is concerned too. The consensus analyst price target of about $43 a share is 15% below the current price of around $50. Seven of the 11 analysts that cover Bending Spoons recommend it is a Buy but three rate it a Hold and one has the equivalent of a Sell on it.

Bank of America's Omar Dessouky downgraded Bending Spoons from a Neutral to an Underperform (i.e. a Sell) on Wednesday. He argued that the run-up in the stock since Bending Spoons announced the Airtable deal is "unjustified" and that investors' assumptions of how much value the company can create from future acquisitions is too high.

Dessouky is also concerned that Bending Spoons will need to do even bigger deals going forward. And the Airtable acquisition is a sign that Bending Spoons may be pivoting from digital media toward software, an industry currently in a state of flux due to concerns about artificial-intelligence. We've all heard about the SaaS-pocalypse for Software as a Service companies.

"The sizes, industries, and business models of future acquisitions will likely differ substantially from pre-26 deals, introducing execution risk," Dessouky wrote, adding that the management team at Bending Spoons has a "less prolific record with sales-driven SaaS businesses."

That's key. Analysts likely will ask Bending Spoons during the company's first earnings conference call about the plans for future acquisitions. Investors like the company's dealmaking strategy so far. But with shares trading at such a premium to other digital media and software firms, Bending Spoons can't afford a misstep with its M&A strategy.