By Paul R. La Monica

AOL's new parent, Bending Spoons, started trading Wednesday on the Nasdaq, soaring 40%. It's a triumphant comeback for the AOL that defined the '90s internet revolution.

Bending Spoons, which trades under the ticker symbol BSP, closed Wednesday at $40.50 a share. At that price, Bending Spoons is worth about $25 billion.

The Italian digital media company, which bought AOL in January, raised nearly $1.7 billion through the sale of 58 million shares at a price of $29, above the range of $26 to $28.

Bending Spoons is trading at 9.6 times its 2025 sales. That's a premium to the price-to-sales ratio of about 7.3 for Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms and only a slight discount to the more than 10 times price-to-sales ratio for Google and YouTube owner Alphabet.

Bending Spoons has expanded through acquisitions, including video sites Brightcove and Vimeo, ticket platform Eventbrite and to-do list app Evernote.

But AOL is the most famous of these brands. And the company has been public before. AOL, known for its yellow running man logo, made its stock market debut in 1992 (as America Online) back when dial-up modems and instant messaging from your desktop computer were cutting edge technologies. The company bought Time Warner in early 2001, a deal that is now considered one of the worst corporate mergers of all time.

AOL was subsequently spun off from Time Warner in 2009. It was bought by Verizon in 2015. The telecom eventually sold AOL and other digital media businesses (including Yahoo!) to private-equity firm Apollo Global Management in 2021. Apollo then completed its sale of AOL to Bending Spoons earlier this year.

Bending Spoons hopes it can revitalize AOL. The company said in its regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it is looking to bring "established businesses back to start-up mode."

CEO Luca Ferrari said in an interview with Barron's Wednesday that with AOL, Bending Spoons sees plenty of areas for improvement.

"This is a product that, while better than most people think, its certainly not world class," Ferrari said, adding that the goal is to improve the email platform and digital content for AOL and its 30 million users.

"This is a business with a substantial loyal customer base. But it has been unloved for a while and we see the opportunity to make it better," Ferrari said.

But the company is also telling investors that even more deals are likely since it prefers acquisitions over organic growth.

The Bending Spoons IPO filing is a lot quirkier than most company prospectuses, which are typically laden with jargon and legalese sections. Instead, Bending Spoons concedes its practices are unusual and won't be embraced by every investor.

That might include the company's propensity to take on debt to finance many of its deals. Bending Spoons said in its SEC filing that it has about $4.4 billion in long-term debt. This could be particularly problematic if interest rates rise, which could increase its servicing costs.

Investors might also balk at the fact that Bending Spoons is barely profitable. Although the company generated revenue of $2.6 billion last year, a pro forma figure that includes AOL and its other recently acquired businesses, it posted a profit of only $22.4 million. So net margins were tiny, at less than 1%. For the first quarter of 2026, Bending Spoons reported revenue of $601.3 million and a net profit of $27.5 million.

And then there's that strange-sounding corporate name. Bending Spoons is a reference to the use of illusions to make it look like a metal spoon is actually bending. The company said in its regulatory filing the name serves as a metaphor for ideas dear to it, such as attempting the seemingly impossible and pursuing bold objectives.

The firm also conceded in the SEC filing that it liked the silliness of using Bending Spoons as a company name, noting that when it was founded in 2013, it had $40,000 and five employees, and a "touch of irony seemed appropriate."

That's all well and good. But the company will need to rely on more than a sense of humor and nostalgia to convince investors to buy the stock. Wall Street prefers tangible results over magic tricks. "You've got Bending Spoons!" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, either.

Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com

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