For a moment in the early 2000s, AOL practically was the internet. A quarter-century later, its comeback headline belongs to someone else.
You've got an IPO
Bending Spoons, the Milan-based technology company that owns AOL, priced its Nasdaq initial public offering above its target range on Wednesday, raising about $1.68 billion and valuing the company near $18 billion, Bloomberg reported. Shares surged roughly 40 percent on their first day of trading, one of the larger European tech listings in recent memory. The offering remains subject to customary closing conditions.
What Bending Spoons is
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Milan, Bending Spoons operates something like a private-equity firm fused with a software company: it buys popular but underperforming digital products, cuts costs sharply, raises subscription prices and modernizes the technology, and says it aims to hold its acquisitions indefinitely. Since 2022 it has snapped up more than 50 products, including Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite and — in 2025 — AOL, TechCrunch reported. Its ten largest properties, AOL among them, account for the bulk of revenue, according to Fortune, which reported 2025 revenue of about $1.3 billion, nearly double the prior year.
AOL's long fall — and quiet survival
AOL's presence in the story is thick with irony. At its peak it claimed some 30 million dial-up subscribers and enough market heft to buy Time Warner in a $182 billion deal in 2000 — then the largest merger in U.S. history. The marriage unraveled as broadband killed dial-up; the combined company posted a roughly $99 billion loss in 2002, still among the worst in corporate history. Time Warner spun AOL off in 2009; Verizon bought it in 2015 for $4.4 billion, then sold most of the unit to Apollo Global Management, which agreed to hand AOL to Bending Spoons last year.
Diminished though it is, AOL is not dead: its email service still counts tens of millions of users and ranks among the world's most-used, and it now generates a substantial share of Bending Spoons' revenue.
The bet
The listing lands as investors show renewed appetite for cash-generating subscription software. Skeptics note Bending Spoons' aggressive post-acquisition layoffs and price hikes — it lifted Evernote's annual price sharply after buying it — and a debt load reported around $6 billion that leaves little margin if growth stalls. For now, the market's first-day verdict was enthusiastic. For AOL, it is less a resurrection than a quiet homecoming: a dial-up relic that outlived every catastrophe thrown at it, trading again on the exchange it once helped define — this time as a line in someone else's prospectus.
