Bending Spoons is worth $24 billion. It trades at 8x ARR and buys B2B companies at 2.3x to 2.7x ARR. 5 learnings from its first 102 days as a public company: #1#. Revenue grew 126%. Organic growth was 3%. Nearly all of the $393M of added revenue in Q2 came from six acquisitions. The CEO says he doesn't optimize for organic growth. He optimizes for EPS, which grew 167%. #2#. R&D is 8% of revenue. Sales and marketing is 10%. HubSpot and Datadog each spend about 70% of revenue on those two lines. Bending Spoons spends 18.6%. About 60 people run Vimeo. The core team is under 700 people, at $4M+ of revenue each. #3#. Miro sold at 2.3x ARR, five weeks after Airtable at 2.7x. $1.08B of ARR for $2.64B, signed 37 days apart. Miro was valued at $17.5B in 2022. Bending Spoons underwrites to a 25% unlevered return. At its 54% margin, that supports about 2.2x ARR. #4#. 1,830 people came with AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo. Only a few hundred were kept. Airtable arrived with 935 employees, more than Bending Spoons’ entire core team. Reorganization costs were $51M in Q2 alone. #5#. AI writes 90%+ of the code. Customers pay about 10% more for the AI features. The CEO says a customer who paid 100 will now pay about 110. The AI gain shows up as capacity: the same 60 people on a business four times the size. If you're at $300M to $800M in ARR growing under 25%, this is the buyer most likely to at least call. But ... the only do a handful of deals a year. Its own stock trades at roughly 7x to 8x revenue. Your revenue is worth about 3x more inside Bending Spoons than it is in your hands.

Bending Spoons might end up being the savior for late-stage VCs who went aggressive in SaaS in 2021. Airtable and Miro sold at ~$1.8-2.3B equity values and the late-stage prefs get paid back in full. In an IPO scenario (if possible at all), they take 80%+ hit.

Bending Spoons agreed to acquire workplace-collaboration platform Miro in an all-cash transaction valuing the business at $1.36 billion, as the Italian technology group continues its acquisition spree.