SACE describes its purpose as fostering exports and supporting the international growth of Italian businesses. It manages guarantees worth around €290bn across 200 markets.

Bending Spoons does not export much. It acquires established digital products, rebuilds them, and keeps them.

Its own website lists the portfolio with dates. Evernote arrived in January 2023, Meetup in January 2024, StreamYard that April, WeTransfer that July. Brightcove and komoot followed in early 2025, then Vimeo in November.

AOL came in January 2026. Eventbrite in March.

Most of those companies are American. WeTransfer is Dutch and komoot is German. The Italian state is therefore guaranteeing debt that will help a national champion buy foreign internet businesses.

That sits within SACE's remit, and its chief executive Michele Pignotti made the reasoning explicit.

The transaction confirms the agency's commitment to “standing alongside leading Italian companies that invest in innovation, expand into global markets, and contribute to the competitiveness of Italy's innovation ecosystem”, he said.

€1.49bn in four months

The SACE facility is one piece of a larger raise. Bending Spoons also agreed €495m of additional term loan A financing and a €490m increase to its revolving credit facility.

Together that comes to €1.49bn of new and expanded facilities since the start of the second quarter. All of it matures in March 2031, and the two non-guaranteed pieces are available for general corporate purposes and acquisitions.

The borrowing follows a listing. Bending Spoons priced its IPO at $29 a share and closed the offering at the start of July, selling nearly 58 million shares.

European technology companies have been reaching for debt markets at scale, with billions raised in euro bonds over the past year.

The roll-up that never sells

The strategy is unusual for an acquirer of this size. Bending Spoons says it has never sold a material business.

Its site puts the position plainly. It buys digital products “not to sell on, but to own and operate for the long term”.

The transformation that follows is deep. The company reorganises teams, rewrites technology, redesigns interfaces and rebuilds monetisation, with AI usually central to the plan.

It runs proprietary systems across the portfolio for lifetime value prediction, payments, marketing attribution and data ingestion, which is how one company operates ten consumer brands at once.

As of March 2026, those brands served more than 500 million monthly active users and over 9 million paying customers.

Buying the old internet

Look at the list again and a pattern appears. AOL defined the consumer internet of the 1990s. Evernote, Vimeo, Meetup, Eventbrite and Brightcove each defined a category in the two decades after.

All of them are now owned by a company founded in Milan in 2014, refinanced with an Italian government guarantee.

Europe has spent years worrying about American platforms buying its startups. This runs the other way, and it arrives as European consolidation accelerates more broadly.

Milan has been gathering weight too, with Anthropic opening an office there to serve enterprise customers.

The open question is what happens when the compounding stops. A model that funds acquisitions with debt works while the acquisitions keep performing. Bending Spoons now has €1.49bn of new capacity and a five-year clock.