Italian company Bending Spoons flew largely under the radar — until last month. In a span of 48 hours, the company announced the acquisition of AOL and a massive $270 million raise, quadrupling its valuation to $11 billion from $2.55 billion set in early 2024.
Bending Spoons has grown rapidly by acquiring stagnating tech brands like Evernote, Meetup, and Vimeo, then turning them profitable through aggressive cost-cutting and price increases. While the company’s approach is similar to private equity, there is one key difference: Bending Spoons has no plans to sell these businesses.
Andrew Dumont, the founder and CEO of Curious, a firm that also acquires and revitalizes what he calls “venture zombies,” is convinced this “hold forever” strategy will become increasingly prominent in the coming years as AI-native startups make older VC-backed software businesses less relevant.
“Our belief is that the venture power law, in which 80% of companies ‘fail’ produces many great businesses, even if they’re not unicorns,” Dumont told TechCrunch.
Dumont defines a “great business” as one that can be purchased at a low price and quickly revived to generate substantial cash flows. This “buy, fix and hold” strategy is the playbook for a growing number of investors, from the 30-year-old Constellation Software, which pioneered the model, to newer players including Bending Spoons, Tiny, SaaS.group, Arising Ventures, and Calm Capital, according to Dumont.
“Our whole model is to buy these companies, make them profitable and use those earnings to grow the business,” Dumont said.
In 2023, Curious has raised $16 million in dedicated capital for buying software companies that have stalled and can no longer secure follow-on investment.
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Since then, the firm has bought five businesses, including UserVoice, a 17-year-old startup that raised $9 million in VC funding from Betaworks and SV Angel.
“It’s a great business, but the cap table wasn’t aligned with keeping it. These funds get old, and these companies just sit there.” Dumont said. “We provide liquidity and also reset these companies for profitability.”
Although Dumont didn’t disclose how much he paid for UserVoice, he said that stagnant companies sell for a fraction of the valuation commanded by healthy SaaS startups, which typically sell for 4x annual revenue or more. Based on our conversation, we estimate that “venture z …