AOL was the first destination on the internet for millions of Americans during the first dot com boom, and is still used by more than 30 million people every month. And now, it’ll be owned by Italians.
Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons announced Wednesday it has agreed to buy AOL from private equity giant Apollo. It’s the latest in a buying spree where it’s snapped up a string of other aging American internet brands like Evernote, Meetup and Brightcove in recent years. Its latest acquisition is decades-older than its typical targets, and its biggest deals to date.
While Bending Spoons did not disclose the terms of the deal, the startup also announced it was raising $2.8 billion in debt to fund the transaction and future takeovers. Reuters had previously reported that the acquisition valued AOL at over $1.4 billion. “It’s a pretty sizable business and a healthy business too,” Bending Spoons cofounder and CEO Luca Ferrari told Forbes. “AOL Mail is good but it could be better and we look forward to making investments in the underlying technology to make it faster, and more intuitive.”
The AOL deal will see Bending Spoons take over an email platform, its homepage, once one of the valuable pieces of internet real estate, and still one of the most visited websites in the U.S..
While AOL’s “loyal” (but greying) customer base of around 8 million daily users might have first gone online in the 1990s and early 2000s, that doesn’t mean that they are about to age out, according to Ferrari. “If most people were in their twenties or thirties, if you add 25 years they are not super old,” he said.
Apollo acquired AOL in 2021 as part of a $5 billion deal where it bought Yahoo and its assets from telecommunications conglomerate Verizon. By that point, AOL was already decades past its peak but remains to this day a sizable business with The Wall Street Journal reporting that it was expected to make $400 million in annual revenue this year.
Bending Spoons said that it plans to be the final owner for AOL which has been caught up in a string of complicated dot com era dealmaking. AOL was relaunched in 1989 as a dial-up internet service provider and became famous after blanketing the United States with millions of trial CDs. Its famous email jingle “You’ve Got Mail” even became the unlikely title for a hit 1998 Hollywood romantic comedy. In 2021, it merged with Time Warner in a disastrous $100 billion deal, one of the largest-ever. The 2015 Verizon deal represented a 96% discount on that price tag.
The deal will help Bending Spoons grow its 300 million monthly users and its revenue, which was on track to hit $1.2 billion this year, said Ferrari. Its stable of apps also includes fitness app Komoot, which it bought in March, and file transfer service WeTransfer, acquired in 2024.
Ferrari’s company last month signed a deal to take private Nasdaq-listed video platform Vimeo for $1.38 billion, which was its largest deal to date, and so far this year has raised around $4 billion in debt, and $155 million in equity.
Scottish fund manager Baillie Gifford marked up its investment in Bending Spoons in March by 89%, suggesting that the company was then valued at over $4.9 billion, making it Italy’s most valuable tech startup.