Vimeo and FiLMiC Pro Owner Bending Spoons Surges in $1.68 Billion Nasdaq IPO Debut

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by Nino LeitnerJuly 2^nd, 2026

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Bending Spoons, the Milan, Italy-based tech conglomerate that owns Vimeo, WeTransfer, Splice, and FiLMiC Pro, has gone public on the Nasdaq, pricing its IPO above range to raise roughly 1.68 billion dollars and then surging about 40 percent on its first day of trading. For filmmakers who have watched the company gut Vimeo’s staff and raise prices across its portfolio, the listing turns a familiar acquisition pattern into a publicly funded mandate to keep buying.

The company priced its offering at 29 dollars per share, above the marketed range of 26 to 28 dollars, selling roughly 58 million ordinary shares under the ticker “BSP.” Shares opened at 31 dollars on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on July 1, 2026, then ran as high as 43.98 dollars before closing at 40.50 dollars, up about 40 percent from the IPO price on the first day. The book was reported as heavily oversubscribed, which had pushed the price above target. Of the shares on offer, the company itself sold about 34.4 million, with the rest coming from existing shareholders, including Baillie Gifford, who sell into the deal without the company receiving those proceeds. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Allen & Company led the syndicate.

For working video professionals, this is not an abstract finance story. Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo for 1.38 billion dollars in November 2025 and then, just four months later, laid off what former employees described as “almost everyone” at the platform, including the entire video engineering team. An IPO does not reverse that. It rewards the model behind it.

Who is Bending Spoons, and why should filmmakers care?

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Milan, Bending Spoons is led by CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari, a former McKinsey consultant. Its business is a private-equity-style software roll-up: buy established but underperforming products with loyal, sticky user bases, restructure aggressively, shift users onto subscriptions, raise prices, and recycle the resulting cash flow (plus a large amount of debt) into the next acquisition. The company says it intends to hold its acquisitions indefinitely.

The portfolio is studded with tools familiar to anyone who shoots, edits, or delivers video. Beyond Vimeo, it includes Splice (mobile editing), FiLMiC Pro (professional mobile capture), WeTransfer (file delivery), StreamYard (live streaming), and Brightcove (enterprise video and OTT). It also owns Evernote, Komoot, AOL, and Eventbrite, having completed more than 50 acquisitions and serving over 500 million monthly active users.

The financials behind the listing

The numbers explain the investor interest, and the oversubscribed book. Bending Spoons reported revenue of 1.31 billion dollars in 2025, up 95 percent year over year, and operating income of 278 million dollars, though on a strict accounting basis the company was roughly break-even for the year. Growth then accelerated: first-quarter 2026 revenue jumped 132 percent to 601 million dollars, swinging to a net profit of 27.5 million dollars from a loss a year earlier. The 18.4 billion dollar IPO valuation marks a sharp step up, about 67 percent, from the roughly 11 billion dollar figure set in a private round led by T. Rowe Price accounts in October 2025.

That growth has been financed heavily with debt. Total borrowings exceed 4 billion dollars, and interest expense climbed to 143 million dollars in 2025. Notably, the company has said it will use IPO proceeds for general corporate purposes and to invest in new acquisitions, not to pay down that debt. In his founder letter, Ferrari wrote that the company has identified more than 1,000 digital businesses, private and public, that could be future acquisition targets. Governance is also concentrated: after the offering, the four co-founders control more than 82 percent of total voting power through super-voting shares.

The Vimeo problem at the center of it all

Vimeo is the clearest illustration of what this model does to a creative tool. The platform spun off from IAC in 2021 at an 8.5 billion dollar valuation; by the time Bending Spoons acquired it for 1.38 billion dollars, that figure had fallen 84 percent.

To be fair, as our earlier reporting on how Vimeo alienated the filmmakers who built it made clear, the platform’s wounds were largely self-inflicted years before Bending Spoons arrived. Self-serve subscribers collapsed from 1.5 million in 2022 to roughly 53,500 by late 2024, a bandwidth cap made the service untenable for high-traffic professionals, and the Staff Picks program that once launched careers was wound down in EU and UK regions. Bending Spoons did not cause the decline, but it has accelerated the consequences.

Shortly before the close, Vimeo unveiled an ambitious roadmap at its REFRAME conference: a rebuilt Vimeo Review with Adobe Premiere Pro integration, natural-language library search, and support for VR180 alongside Apple Immersive Video. Then, on January 20, 2026, the layoffs landed. Multiple reports indicated more than 1,000 employees were affected globally, with the video engineering team eliminated entirely. Bending Spoons offered only that it “remains committed to growing Vimeo to meet the needs of its diverse user base.”

A playbook filmmakers have seen before

The Vimeo cuts fit a documented pattern. After acquiring FiLMiC Pro in 2022, Bending Spoons let go all 22 original team members, including the founder, and converted the app from a one-time purchase to a subscription, with only minimal updates since. WeTransfer lost roughly 75 percent of its staff, about 260 people, within weeks of its 2024 acquisition, capped free transfers at 10 per month, and briefly drew backlash for terms-of-service language that appeared to permit AI training on user files before reversing course. The consistent result is fewer engineers, higher prices, and tighter free tiers.

For Vimeo users, the effects are already visible. The platform restructured its subscription tiers in early 2026, and while Bending Spoons describes the new individual plans as cheaper, users have reported forced migrations that push legacy accounts onto far more expensive professional tiers unless they manually downgrade. Livestream.com was discontinued, and whether the REFRAME roadmap advances at all is now an open question given how few engineers remain.

What this means if you rely on Vimeo or its siblings

The IPO does not change the day-to-day reality, but it clarifies the direction. Capital raised in the offering is earmarked for more acquisitions, not creator-facing reinvestment, and the heavy interest burden creates ongoing pressure to extract margin from existing products. Enterprise and AI features may continue to receive investment; the individual creator tier is where the squeeze tends to fall.

The sensible response is to treat Vimeo and its siblings as vendors in active turnaround. Back up portfolios, client work, and archives locally rather than trusting a single closed platform, whether through a cloud backup service such as Backblaze or your own redundant storage. Before your next renewal, check how your legacy plan is being reclassified and model your bandwidth against the fair-use caps that can trigger expensive enterprise contracts. It is also worth piloting alternatives, whether that is an established review platform like Frame.io, a GDPR-friendly European option such as RevCut.io, or a creator-community service such as rushes, the European Vimeo alternative launched in 2026 partly in response to exactly this situation.

A few caveats are worth flagging. The 18.4 billion dollar figure is the offer-price valuation; the first-day surge pushed the market value well above that, closer to 25 billion dollars at the closing price, which tells you more about IPO demand than about the durability of the business. Several first-quarter figures are labeled “as restated,” and the company disclosed material weaknesses in its internal financial controls, which it attributes partly to the complexity of constantly integrating new acquisitions. This is a thread CineD has tracked through several recent stories, from Sony Pictures leaning on AI to cut production costs to the consolidation reshaping the wider media landscape. A successful listing validates a model that buys creative tools, strips them down, and runs them for cash, and it will likely encourage imitators to do the same with other products filmmakers depend on.

Are you still hosting client work on Vimeo, or have you started moving to alternatives? Does a publicly traded Bending Spoons make you more or less confident about the tools it owns? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!