What the Bending Spoons IPO reveals about Evernote

Bending Spoons listed on Nasdaq this week. Priced at $29, closed the first day 40% up, somewhere around $25 billion. An Italian company from Milan that most people have never heard of. You would have used their products though - Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup, Vimeo, and since January, AOL. Yes, AOL still exists, and it is now owned by Italians.

I went through their IPO prospectus over the last few days. Honestly, I wasn't reading it for Bending Spoons. I was reading it for Evernote. Evernote was private for fifteen years and its numbers were always folklore - big claims in press releases, nothing audited. This filing puts real numbers against the folklore for the first time.

Some history first, for those who came in late. Evernote was the unicorn. May 2012, billion dollar valuation, back when that word was rare enough to mean something. Raised around $270 million over its life. Claimed 225 million registered users at peak. Phil Libin famously said he was building a "100-year startup".

Now the filing.

The price - Evernote sold in January 2023 for $199.7 million. Read that against the $270 million it raised. The company sold for less than the money investors put into it.

The revenue - $95 million in 2023. Thats the whole business. A company once valued at a billion dollars, with over 200 million accounts created, was doing well under $100 million a year.

The users - the famous 225 million was cumulative signups, ever. Working backwards from the revenue, the actual paying base is around a million subscribers (the filing discloses WeTransfer at 1 million paying customers on similar revenue, which is a good sanity check). Less than 1% of everyone who ever signed up paid anything at all.

So unicorn-era Evernote was a hundred-million-dollar business wearing a billion dollar costume, kept alive by the small minority who genuinely could not live without it.

And that minority is the most interesting part of the filing. Net revenue retention - 99%. The best of every business Bending Spoons owns, better than AOL (95%), better than their AI photo app Remini (87%). Average customer tenure at acquisition - 7.2 years. New registrations had been falling 20-23% every year for three years, but the existing users were not going anywhere. People with ten years and thousands of notes inside a product do not churn.

Which explains the acquisition better than any strategy slide. Bending Spoons did not buy growth. They bought a million people who couldn't leave, for $200 a head.

What they did next is a whole post in itself (I've written it separately), but the short version - prices nearly doubled, revenue per user reached 2.5x the 2022 level by 2025, subscriber count actually fell, and Evernote made $11.3 million profit before tax in year one after roughly a decade of losses. My estimate from the disclosed numbers is that Evernote does $120-130 million revenue now, at margins that pay back the entire purchase price within about four years.

Zoom out and you see why Wall Street gave this IPO a 40% pop. Bending Spoons went from $387 million revenue in 2023 to $1.31 billion in 2025. Only 7-13% a year of that is organic. The rest is buying. They deployed $2 billion on acquisitions in Q1 2026 alone, and the IPO just handed them public currency to keep going.

Phil Libin wanted a 100-year startup. It lasted fifteen. The notes will easily last the hundred years though. Just that somebody else collects rent on them now.