AOL, Vimeo owner just filed to IPO. Why?<br>Marketplace®<br>Every story is an economic story

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Jun 8, 2026<br>A tech company you've probably never heard of just filed to IPO<br>Last year, Bending Spoons lost more than $100 million. But now, it’s turning a profit.

Companiesby Caleigh Wells<br>PlayListen NowSaveShareDownload

Some people keep their AOL addresses to avoid retailer emails in their regular inboxes. But those emails contain plenty of data that AI companies want to buy.<br>zakokor/Getty Images

Vimeo, AOL, Eventbrite, and WeTransfer all have a couple things in common, aside from being throwbacks to the aughts and 2010s: They're still alive, and they're all owned by a tech company called Bending Spoons.<br>Those brands — and the others that the company has acquired — aren’t exactly known for being cash cows. Last year, Bending Spoons lost more than $100 million.<br>But now, it’s turning a profit — and it's just filed to go public on the stock market.<br>How could anyone could turn a profit on AOL? Actually, it’s pretty simple to Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School. She’s got an AOL email address herself.<br>“If you're still on AOL, chances are there's some idiosyncratic thing you get from them,” she said. “I have a bunch of friends who are on AOL, because it's the throwaway email that they give to their shopping sites.”<br>But the contents of their spam boxes is treasure because there is a lot of information in there that Bending Spoons can sell.<br>“Nordstrom knows me as my AOL address, but now AOL knows that I'm a Nordstrom shopper,” McGrath said.<br>That information wasn’t valuable enough for AOL alone. Or for many of the other companies that Bending Spoons acquires. So the name of the game is cuts and consolidation.<br>“You only need one CFO. You only need one chief marketing officer,” said analyst Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics.<br>He said a team running several brands at once leads to fatter profit margins. “You can have a very efficient sales force when you are one large company instead of a significant number of small companies,” he said.<br>A lot of companies that Bending Spoons buys up have “sticky,” loyal subscriber bases. Think Columbia’s Rita McGrath and her AOL account.<br>If Bending Spoons wants to keep buying companies like that, it needs capital — that’s where the initial public offering comes in:<br>“They are trying to feed the acquisition machine,” said Forest Connor, an analyst at Gartner. “They want to find more businesses, expand this model that has been their ethos from the beginning, and so what they're looking to do is continue that on a larger scale.”<br>Plus, amid the AI boom, selling data is more profitable. The company’s revenue last quarter is more than double what it posted a year earlier.<br>More on data sales:<br>Different customers, different prices: Companies use data for personalized pricing

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Tagged as:<br>aol<br>Bending Spoons<br>customer data<br>IPO<br>data<br>Vimeo

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