Italy’s Bending Spoons targets AOL in $1.4B deal

Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons —best known for its quirky name and “Impossible.Maybe” logo—has been on an aggressive acquisition spree, buying up faded U.S. internet brands. After snapping up Vimeo ($1.38B), Brightcove, Evernote, and WeTransfer, the company is now in advanced talks to acquire AOL from Apollo-owned Yahoo for $1.4B , Reuters reports. AOL, once the face of the internet with “You’ve Got Mail,” still generates revenue via advertising and subscription services like LifeLock and LastPass. Recent growth has come from revamped content categories, lifting traffic among 25–54-year-olds by 20% YoY.

Bending Spoons, valued at $2.55B in 2024, now counts 300M monthly users across its portfolio. CEO Luca Ferrari frames its strategy as “buying tech businesses with untapped potential.” With a string of acquisitions and U.S. scale ambitions, bankers see the Italian unicorn as a likely IPO candidate in the near future.