Q2 2026 Bending Spoons SPA Earnings Call
Speaker #1: 7-day scalp patsa, co-CFO, Francesco Manconi, CTO, and Francesco Partonello, co-founder and head of M&A. But before we begin, let me cover the safe harbor statement: some of the information you'll hear today will consist of forward-looking statements, including those regarding our objectives and outlook.
Speaker #1: These statements reflect our current expectations and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties. Actual results and events may differ materially. For more information, please refer to our registration statement on the Form F1, including the risk factors described there.
Speaker #1: We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Join the call; we'll discuss both gap and non-gap financial measures. You can find the definitions of our non-gap financial measures together with reconciliations to the most directly comparable gap financial measures in today's earnings press release, which is available on the Bending Spoons Investor Relations website at investors.bendingspoons.com.
Speaker #1: Unless we say otherwise, all comparisons refer to year-over-year results. And now, over to you, Luca.
Speaker #2: Thanks, James. And thank you all for joining Bending Spoons' first quarterly earnings call. I'll first explain what Bending Spoons is, then I'll briefly summarize the quarter: finally, I'll address a question central to our long-term prospects—what could constrain our ability to scale.
Speaker #2: Our playbook is simple: we acquire digital businesses, undertake deep integrations and transformations to improve them, and reinvest the cash they generate to gather with incremental leverage in further acquisitions.
Speaker #2: Underlying this playbook is our long-term aspiration to build what we think of as the perfect operating machine. We've been refining this model since 2013.
Speaker #2: At its foundation, is what we call our platform, which consists of three elements: our people, our proprietary technologies, and our proprietary data. Today, our platform brings together nearly 700 selectively recruited core team members, whom we call spooners.
Speaker #2: Powerful internally developed technologies spanning everything from A/B testing to AI model orchestration, and valuable insights accumulated through more than 50 acquisitions and thousands of experiments.
Speaker #2: And our results to date have demonstrated what we can achieve with this platform: since the start of 2023, we've deployed nearly $6 billion across 15 acquisitions, consistently applying 25% unlevered and 65% unlevered IRR hurdles in our underwriting process.
Speaker #2: Through the execution of our playbook, we've more than tripled revenue, operating income, and adjusted operating income in the 2 years to 2025. I'll turn now to Q2 2026, where we delivered a similar level of growth.
Speaker #2: Revenue increased 126% to $704 million, operating income increased 139% to $240 million, representing a margin of 34%. Adjusted operating income increased 150% to $381 million, representing a margin of 54%.
Speaker #2: Diluted earnings per share was $28, up 163%, and adjusted earnings per share was $46, up 167%. Operationally, we made encouraging progress in the transformations of AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo.
Speaker #2: During the quarter, we released more than 70 product improvements across these 3 businesses. We also made substantial progress modernizing their underlying technologies—creating a stronger foundation for a faster pace of product development and monetization improvement.
Speaker #2: We continued to strengthen our proprietary technologies, added dozens of spooners to our team, expanded our sources of financing, completed the acquisition of attractive for enterprise value of $759 million, and undertook negotiations to acquire Airtable, with us last week announcing we had reached an agreement to acquire the business for an enterprise value of $1.29 billion.
Speaker #2: While we're pleased with what we've delivered in Q2, our focus remains on the long term. In particular, given how quickly we've been growing and the natural question is how far Bending Spoons can scale, and what could ultimately limit that growth.
Speaker #2: We think about this constantly and see at least 3 potential constraints. The availability of attractive acquisition opportunities, our operational capacity to integrate and transform the acquired businesses, and access to capital at reasonable terms.
Speaker #2: To expand our capacity to grow and fulfill our ambitions for Bending Spoons, we continually work to ease these constraints. I'll discuss our approach to each in turn, and highlight some of the actions we've taken recently.
Speaker #2: The first potential constraint is the availability of attractive acquisition targets. As we described in our IPO prospectus, our bottom-up analysis has identified more than 1,000 digital businesses that could be attractive targets over the next several years.
Speaker #2: Collectively, those businesses generate nearly $400 billion of estimated revenue in 2025. We therefore don't currently view target availability as a material constraint, at least for the next few years, and our acquisition pipeline is a strong as at any point in our history.
Speaker #2: However, to maximize our prospects of generating attractive returns for many years to come, we believe it's important to continue expanding our addressable market and broadening the range of businesses within this addressable market, with acquisitions we can underwrite with conviction.
Speaker #2: We approach this deliberately. Ideally, for any acquisition of material size, the core economics should be familiar to us, and any new capability the business brings should have the potential to be reused across our platform.
Speaker #2: Attractive is a good example. It's the market-leading pet tracking and health monitoring service, and we were attracted to the business due to the growth potential of the category and the opportunities we saw to continue improving the product offering, broaden distribution, and optimize marketing.
Speaker #2: Attractive from early generates revenue through subscriptions—an area in which we have extensive experience. However, it also incorporates a physical device, giving us an opportunity to deepen our capabilities in areas such as hardware design, device connectivity, supply chain management, and support for an installed base.
Speaker #2: Success with Attractive would give us confidence in further expanding our addressable market. Airtable provides another example. Airtable is a no-code, low-code platform that enables teams to organize data and manage critical workflows.
Speaker #2: The strength of its brand and product is its positive revenue trajectory and the still sizable opportunity in the category all contributed to our decision to acquire the business.
Speaker #2: A substantial portion of Airtable's revenues generated through the self-serve channel again an area very familiar to us. However, depending on acquisition would also create an opportunity for us to deepen our experience serving enterprise customers through direct sales.
Speaker #2: Enterprise SaaS is included in our $400 billion addressable market estimate, and we already have a foundation in this area through BrightCove and Vimeo. At the same time, further enhancing our platform in connection with direct enterprise sales, we improve our ability to confidently underwrite more acquisitions of this kind going forward.
Speaker #2: The second capacity required to undertake the deep integrations and transformations that are often needed to achieve our return objectives. AI is becoming increasingly important in expanding that capacity, and during Q2, we made further progress incorporating AI into our day-to-day work.
Speaker #2: One example is Old Spooner, a personal AI agent that we developed during the quarter and made available to every spooner in early July. It operates within each user's existing access permissions and can work with that person's authorized history and connected accounts.
Speaker #2: Old Spooner runs on open-weight models that we host ourselves. And its model-agnostic architecture allows us to use and compare different models, including closed-weight ones, as their performance and economics evolve.
Speaker #2: During its first 3 weeks of general availability, Old Spooner processed more than $100 billion tokens, the speed of adoption and its effectiveness have been encouraging.
Speaker #2: I've personally had some wow moments with Old Spooner. During Q2, we also introduced AI-enabled interactive tasks into parts of our recruiting process. We're testing indicates that these tasks provide a predictive input into candidate assessment.
Speaker #2: They also make our recruiting process more scalable. This initiatives build on a broader, sophisticated, and long-standing use of AI across our platform, and our overall progress in expanding operational capacity can be seen in our productivity metrics.
Speaker #2: In Q2, revenue per spooner exceeded $4 million on an annualized basis. We're also undertaking increasingly large transformations without a comparable increase in the number of spooners deployed.
Speaker #2: For instance, around 60 spooners worked on Vimeo during Q2, brought in line with the number of spooners who worked on the Evernote transformation in 2023.
Speaker #2: This is despite Vimeo being roughly 4 times the size of Evernote in revenue terms and a more complicated business from both a technical and operational perspective.
Speaker #2: Even with these efficiency gains, spooners are likely to remain our scarcest resource. Therefore, we'll continue to invest in our ability to attract, select, retain, and develop exceptional talent at scale.
Speaker #2: We'll also continue to make aggressive trade-offs as we deploy resources to what we judge to be the highest return activities. Most often, this is the integration and transformation of recently acquired businesses.
Speaker #2: Finally, we can rule out the possibility that, from time to time, we'll have to slow down our acquisition activity in light of operational capacity constraints.
Speaker #2: The third potential constraint is access to capital. Through the actions taken during Q2 and after quarter end, both the scale of the resources available to us and the breadth of our financing options have improved.
Speaker #2: During Q2, we entered into new Euro denominated term loan facilities totaling $255 million and increased our Euro denominated revolving credit facility by $460 million, for a total of $1.58 billion.
Speaker #2: Based on the quarter end, exchange rate. After quarter end, we secured a further $590 million of term loan financing, increased our revolving credit facility by another $30 million, and received net proceeds of $1.10 billion from our IPO.
Speaker #2: These actions, together with our existing cash balances and the cash we expect our businesses to continue generating, provide sufficient funding for the pending Airtable acquisition while preserving flexibility to pursue additional acquisitions that meet our return thresholds.
Speaker #2: We intend to exercise that flexibility while maintaining plenty of headroom under our debt covenants and a sufficient liquidity to meet our obligations in a range of downside scenarios.
Speaker #2: As a public company, we now have access to a broader range of financing sources. We'll select among those sources, carefully, remaining focused on the objectives of maximizing long-term shareholder returns while keeping a prudent risk profile.
Speaker #2: With that, I'll hand the call over to Enrico to discuss our financial results, in greater detail.
Speaker #1: Thank you, Luca, and hello everyone. In Q2, we delivered triple-digit revenue growth and expanded our profitability. We'd contributions from across our diversified portfolio of businesses.
Speaker #1: Cash generation and our financial position remained strong. I'll cover each of these areas before discussing our outlook. For Q2, total revenue was $704 million, up 126%.
Speaker #1: Organic revenue growth was 3%. Underpinning this organic revenue growth, the strongest contributions came from WeTransfer and Traktiv, partly offset by a decline in revenue and splice revenue.
Speaker #1: Relative to our expectations, we primarily saw better-than-anticipated performance in IOL advertising. Q2 operating income totaled $240 million. Increasing 139%. And adjusted operating income reached $381 million.
Speaker #1: Increasing 150%. To calculate adjusted operating income, we remove amortization and impairment of acquired intangible assets, transaction-related expense, reorganization-related expense, and other items that we don't consider indicative of core or ongoing operating performance.
Speaker #1: Operating income margin was 34%, and adjusted operating income margin was 54%, expanding 2 percentage points and 5 percentage points, respectively. This margin expansion resulted from scale economies as well as operational efficiencies unlocked as we continue to improve our platform.
Speaker #1: In addition, we keep redeploying spooners to areas offering the highest return, which we see as an advantage of our approach. Looking at the major components of our cost base, cost of revenue increased to $241 million.
Speaker #1: Representing 34% of revenue. Unchanged from the prior year period. The increase in cost of revenue was primarily driven by three factors. First, an increase in amortization of acquired intangible assets, reflecting continued acquisition activity.
Speaker #1: Second, an increase in IT infrastructure expense, reflecting an increasing cloud infrastructure utilization, mainly driven by acquisitions. And third, an increase in distribution and payment processing expense, reflecting the increase in revenue.
Speaker #1: Operating expenses increased to $223 million. Representing 32% of revenue. Compared with 33% in the prior year period. The increase in operating expenses primarily reflects personal costs associated with the ongoing operation of newly acquired businesses and separation packages offered to team members in connection with the reorganization of AOL, Evan Bright, Traktiv, and Vimeo.
Speaker #1: After adjusting for the items excluded in our calculation of adjusted operating income, cost of revenue increased to $155 million. This represents 22% of revenue, unchanged from the prior year period.
Speaker #1: The increase was primarily driven by IT infrastructure expense, and distribution and payment processing expense. Adjusted to exclude the same cost items, operating expenses increased to $168 million.
Speaker #1: Representing 24% of revenue, compared to 29% in the prior year period. We continue to drive productivity across the organization and remain disciplined in our approach to sales and marketing activities.
Speaker #1: The development and adoption of cutting-edge technological tools, as been and should remain, a key driver of efficiency gains. Equity compensation expense totaled $40 million in Q2, we do not exclude these expense in the calculation of our known gap financial measures.
Speaker #1: Returning to our gap financials, interest expense was $109 million. Rising 205% year over year due to an increase in our absolute debt levels and to a much lesser extent, an increase in the effective interest rate.
Speaker #1: Other income recognized an income tax benefits of $26 million. This resulted in dilute earnings per share of $28 cents and adjusted earnings per share of $46 cents, up 163% and 167%, respectively.
Speaker #1: As we detailed in our earnings release, we've revised our definition of adjusted net income and adjusted earnings per share to exclude two additional items.
Speaker #1: Foreign exchange gains and losses on assets and liabilities denominated in a non-functional currency are now excluded. As are gains and losses from changes in the fair value of interest rate swaps.
Speaker #1: These items are recorded in other expense income in our gap financial statements, and have been excluded from our known gap financial measures as we believe that such adjustments improve period-to-period comparability.
Speaker #1: Full details of these revisions together with recast historical results can be found in our earnings release. Turning now to cash flow and our financial position.
Speaker #1: For the first half of 2026, net cash from operating activities totaled $254 million. Against capital expenditure of just $4 million. This cash flow was net of cash payments associated with transaction-related expense and reorganization-related expense.
Speaker #1: In terms of uses of cash, in the first half of the year we paid $2.29 billion per acquisition, net of cash received. We also made $204 million in principal repayments of long-term debt.
Speaker #1: We ended Q2 with total long-term debt of $4.88 billion. Cash and cash equivalents of $793 million and thus net debt of $4.09 billion. Leverage ratio stood at 2.4 times.
Speaker #1: Please refer to the earnings release for the definitions of net debt and leverage ratio. During the quarter, we entered into new euro denominated term loan facilities with an aggregate principal amount of $255 million.
Speaker #1: And obtained $460 million increase of our existing euro denominated revolving credit facility. We drew a total of $581 million under a combination of these new term loan facilities and existing term loan and revolving credit facilities.
Speaker #1: Of that amount, $296 million was drawn under the revolving credit facilities on May 6, 2026. Remained outstanding as of quarter end, and has since been repaid.
Speaker #1: After the end of Q2 2026, we entered into additional euro denominated term loan facilities totaling $590 million. And obtained increases of euro denominated revolving credit facilities for a total amount of $30 million.
Speaker #1: Also, we sold 39.6 million primary shares at $29 per share in our initial public offering in July. Net of underwriting discounts and commissions, this raised the total of $1.10 billion.
Speaker #1: The primary shares issued in our initial public offering will be reflected in our basic and diluted shares outstanding as of Q3 2026. Now to guidance.
Speaker #1: For Q3, we expect revenue to be in the range of $733 million to $745 million. And for adjusted operating income to be in the range of $380 million to $400 million.
Speaker #1: For the full year, we expect revenue to be in the range $2.78 billion to $2.82 billion. And for adjusted operating income to be in the range of $1.46 billion to $1.51 billion.
Speaker #1: This guidance is based on the set of businesses we own today, and doesn't incorporate any contribution from future acquisitions. Specifically, it doesn't include any contribution from depending Airtable acquisition, which we expect to close before the end of the year.
Speaker #1: With that, we are ready to start the Q&A portion of the call.
Speaker #2: Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced.
Speaker #2: Two withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, please kindly limit yourself to one question and one follow-up so that everyone can ask their questions.
Speaker #2: Thank you. We are now going to proceed with our first question. And the questions come from the line of Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs.
Speaker #2: Please ask your question.
Speaker #3: Thanks so much for taking the question and congrats on the inaugural earnings report. Coming back to the Airtable acquisition, maybe just a few parts.
Speaker #3: Do you have an expected close date? And then the second part of it may be when you think about the historical financials of Airtable, where do you think the biggest opportunities sit to continue to grow ARR and/or improve the operating margin of the company post-close?
Speaker #3: Thanks so much.
Speaker #4: Thanks, Eric. Luca here, co-founder CEO at Bending Spoons welcome everybody. So regarding the closing date, we don't know. We are expecting the transaction to close this year, but it's difficult to be more precise.
Speaker #4: In terms of our the opportunity, we see with Airtable I will start with the strengths. We believe that the brand and the product are really good, and importantly, they serve a critical use case for organizations Airtable is used to collect and manage data and build applications that are used across teams and departments it's often at the center of the how companies that choose to adopt Airtable operate.
Speaker #4: And as such, we believe offers a strong foundation for continued growth and value creation. We are excited specifically to your question. We're excited about both the ability to keep growing the top line.
Speaker #4: We believe that there is significant untapped opportunity to continue expanding within existing accounts and acquire new customers. We look forward to working with the Airtable team to help turbocharge that.
Speaker #4: And we also believe that there are opportunities for operational efficiency.
Speaker #3: Great. Thank you.
Speaker #2: We are now going to proceed with our next question. And the questions come from the line of Lloyd Wensley from Mizuho. Please ask your question.
Speaker #5: Thanks. Two questions, if I can. First, just going back to Airtable, how much of, I guess, a shift is this in the sense that it's growing significantly faster when you're acquiring it than prior deals?
Speaker #5: Does this is there really an opportunity to really find really attractive businesses like this given the environment we are in with sort of a lot of privately funded software companies that are looking for a home that are still high quality, but struggle to raise money?
Speaker #5: Is this sort of like a groundbreaking example of the environment we're in? And then the second one would just be if we think about the enterprise value you've acquired year to date at about three and a half, I think that's about where we were for the full year.
Speaker #5: Is there room to do more this year, or should we assume the big ones are largely behind us for this year in terms of the future of M&A?
Speaker #5: Thanks.
Speaker #4: So regarding the growth profile for Airtable, we think I think it's a little bit about false myth that we have only acquired more stagnant businesses.
Speaker #4: We are neutral on the growth profiles of the businesses we acquire. Obviously, we'll tend to pay higher price for growthy businesses, but we are happy to buy businesses that have been growing and we expect to continue growing faster, grow more slowly, stay flat, or even occasionally shrink.
Speaker #4: Of the businesses we have acquired so far, several were growing nicely. We transfer Komoot Remeny back in the day. So attractive recently. So it's not all that new to us, but yes, it's of course great news when we can acquire a business with plenty of growth ahead if the price is reasonable.
Speaker #4: Regarding the ability that we have to continue doing acquisitions going forward, I think only time will tell. We see the environment as favorable. And we have capital to deploy.
Speaker #4: Thanks to both the IPO and recent that raises as well as our continued cash generation. We have operational capacity, although certainly with Airtable we will be assuming it closes in the next few months, we will be at five businesses acquired in the trailing 12-month period, which is, let's say, toward the higher end of what we generally feel ideal for us.
Speaker #4: But we're more capacity to do a little bit more if the appropriate opportunity presents itself. And so we're positive our pipeline looks probably as good as it ever has, to be honest.
Speaker #4: Yep. But we'll see. I mean, M&A remains an opportunistic endeavor, so it's impossible to be 100% certain. What will happen?
Speaker #5: All right. Thank you.
Speaker #2: We are now going to proceed with our next question. The next questions come from the line of Doug Enmoth from JPMorgan. Please ask your question.
Speaker #5: Thanks so much for taking the question. I just wanted to ask about the recent tractive acquisition and just the fact that it's one of your first deals that has a hardware component.
Speaker #5: Just curious how you're thinking about hardware-enabled businesses and where that has a place in your M&A philosophy going forward. Thanks.
Speaker #4: Thank you. Thank you for the question. So in general, we almost everything we do at Bending Spoons is aimed at trying to maximize the probability that we can fully realize the ambitions we have for this company, which is a massive ambition of growth over the very long term.
Speaker #4: And with that in mind, expanding our addressable market, many years before it becomes a constraint is important. So we shared in our perspectives that we found approximately 1,000 digital businesses that we think could become attractive acquisition targets over the next several years.
Speaker #4: And they aggregate to approximately 400 billion dollars in revenue estimated revenue for 2025. By the way, there is growth overall in this sample, so presumably the size will be a little bit bigger in 2026.
Speaker #4: So that's a we think that's a huge addressable market. And that's fully digital stuff. But becoming world-class at almost any difficult thing takes a while.
Speaker #4: And so once we found attractive, which was primarily where we think you win primarily through the digital experience and where monetization is primarily through subscriptions areas that we understand, I would believe really well, yet we're harder was a part of the overall equation, we jumped at it.
Speaker #4: We saw wonderful company with a very good opportunity ahead of itself, and at the same time, the added bonus of being able to train our muscles when it comes to, in this case, the consumer hardware.
Speaker #4: So that was the thinking behind it. We are extremely happy with the acquisition so far. And we're finding that although clearly we have limited experience with hardware, we are already finding ways of adding value.
Speaker #4: We're learning a lot from the team. So the market for businesses that have a hardware plus software component is massive, clearly. And so maybe in time we'll be able to do more in this let's say adjacent area.
Speaker #4: So far so good, but of course the jury is still out.
Speaker #5: Thank you.
Speaker #2: We are now going to proceed with our next question. And the questions come from the line of Stefan Sloinski from BNP Paribas. Please ask your question.
Speaker #6: Yes. Thank you. And congrats from me as well on the first quarter. Just wanted to ask about the organic growth in the quarter of 3%.
Speaker #6: I believe it was down from 6% in Q1. So just wondering if the underlying business, if that's in line with your expectations, and then the follow-up would just be if you're seeing any accelerating AI impact on the portfolio today, whether it be in terms of disruption in those markets or whether it be in terms of opportunity from a product standpoint or a pricing standpoint.
Speaker #6: Thank you.
Speaker #4: Thanks. So regarding the 3%, it came in a little bit higher than we expected. The close, but a little bit higher than we expected.
Speaker #4: The largest contributors as we included in our disclosures where we transfer and tractive, and then revenue supplies were the negative contributors. Obviously, as we added recently added AOL Eventbrite and Vimeo, which in aggregate grew in the low single digit that also affected the overall growth rate of the company.
Speaker #4: So that's the short explanation for the 3%. Obviously, the blended growth rate will depend each time on the composition of our portfolio at that point in time.
Speaker #4: The performance of individual businesses a year prior sometimes a business may be doing well, but had an especially good quarter, a year prior, it will depend on the sequencing of monetization improvements, which can also influence blended organic growth rates substantially.
Speaker #4: Anyway, that's a 3%. And then taking a step back, I think this is a good opportunity to reiterate we talk about this in our perspectives, but I'd like to reiterate on how we look at organic revenue growth.
Speaker #4: So our goal, and I mentioned it a few minutes ago, is to maximize shareholder value, the success of this company, 10 years out. And that translates into trying to compound revenue and operating income, earnings per share on a per share basis, including revenue and operating income as quickly as we can.
Speaker #4: And we are pretty much neutral when it comes to the underlying characteristics. We're happy to do it at any particular organic growth rate. We're happy to do it at any particular margin structure within reason.
Speaker #4: And we believe that the mathematically sound way of approaching creating shareholder value. So sometimes as we approach our M&A activities with that objective in mind, we find that the best return opportunity is in a slow growing business, such as AOL, an acquisition we're actually extremely happy with.
Speaker #4: Like I said, growing slow single digit within actually a much better business than people realize. And even sometimes shrinking businesses, if the IRR is what it needs to be, we're happy to pick those up.
Speaker #4: But equally, if we find that great returns are promised with fast growing of your peers mentioned Airtable moments ago, and I mentioned tractive and Komoot as other examples of fast growing businesses we have acquired somewhat recently.
Speaker #4: We're happy to get those done as well. So organic revenue growth will just be an output of our capital deployment activities. And it could be higher or lower, and it's not something we particularly focus on or certainly not something we optimize for.
Speaker #4: Regarding AI, we haven't seen any noticeable disruption in any of our businesses really, because of AI. I think at least none of the significant ones I think it could make an argument.
Speaker #4: I'm not entirely convinced, but I think it could make an argument that revenues decline could be connected to progress in AI. Frankly, we see that revenues existing users and customers continue to behave exactly as before.
Speaker #4: We haven't noticed any change in behavior. It's just that acquiring new users and customers was particularly challenging for that business in recent quarters. And we believe it's mostly due to saturation in the market.
Speaker #4: Ultimately, this is a market that was born only a few years ago automatic generation of image and video content. And a lot of progress has been made by us and others it's more difficult now to come up with novel ideas and a lot of revenues growth was driven by, let's say, viral spikes where with major innovations and we were able to attract new users in jobs here and there.
Speaker #4: An unusual pattern, by the way, I would say revenue is the only one business in our portfolio where customer acquisition was spiky all of our other businesses of any significance are perhaps much more boring, but also much more predictable in that they acquisition comes from word of mouth and it's quite steady over time.
Speaker #4: And so I think mostly saturation, but I think it's a reasonable argument that one could make that because it's now more commoditized the generation of content, especially image, but also video content through AI.
Speaker #4: Competition has intensified and therefore while this has not apparently impacted the behavior of our existing users and customers has made it more difficult. Or expensive to attract new users and customers.
Speaker #4: So that's the only area of our business where I think potentially AI has had a negative impact other than that we haven't seen anything whatsoever.
Speaker #4: In terms of upside, I'm probably not saying anything shocking here, but we are seeing massive opportunity in terms of operational efficiency. We mentioned our recent release, internal release of a tool called Alt Spooner, like alternative spooner.
Speaker #4: It's a pretty wonderful technology in my view. That enables people to be superhuman in their productivity. I'll give you an example. Quite recently, I was in a Slack channel with one of our general managers.
Speaker #4: She leads Evernote. Specifically, and this channel is meant to be a place where we provide feedback on how the product could be improved and this person posted by asking Alt Spooner because you talked to Alt Spooner as if it were a colleague on any company channel.
Speaker #4: She asked her Alt Spooner to investigate a bug she had noticed and check with our internal technologies. There's one called Moros that enables tracking customer support tickets for product insights.
Speaker #4: So she asked her Alt Spooner to look for this bug if it had been reported by other customers and so if we could conclude it's a prevalent bug or just something extremely rare that she encountered.
Speaker #4: And then assuming that the answer was this has been reported by others, she asked her Alt Spooner to investigate the root cause in the code program a fix and then reach out to Evernote's tech leader asking that he review and hopefully approve the pull request so that the bug can be fixed and pushed to production.
Speaker #4: And I witnessed this. This was the first time I saw Alt Spooner in full force and in a matter of probably, I don't know, five minutes or something like that, five or ten minutes, all of these tasks had been completed and the only reason why the bug was fixed the day after is because the technology leader was now checking Slack at that particular point in time, which maybe we can improve on that too.
Speaker #4: But it is mind-blowing because this is a process in the past would have taken optimistically a week and probably a few tens of person hours and was completed in maybe, I don't know, like half an hour by Spooner's real humans.
Speaker #4: So that's an example where our operations have really picked up inefficiency thanks to AI. There are many more, but this hopefully makes the case.
Speaker #4: And then in terms of, let's say, the more visible ways AI can be helpful, of course, you can serve customers better. Through AI, most of our product work, yeah, I would say most is probably accurate to say.
Speaker #4: Certainly a big part of our product work across our portfolio over the past maybe six months or so has been focused on AI-related or even AI-centric functionality and thinking in a bright code or introduced auto-translations audio track dubbing live captions in 50 plus languages.
Speaker #4: It's all basically done with AI. This was a transformative feature for our enterprise customers. We introduced content multiplier, which enables content organizations, media companies to take their high-quality content and produce all sorts of alternative formats, shorter versions, highlights they can post.
Speaker #4: It's just a few clicks. This makes them a lot leaner, faster, more successful. We introduced recommendations so that once if you're a media company using a bright code, once a user of yours, your audience has completed watching one of your videos, then you can enable recommendations like YouTube a little bit.
Speaker #4: And these are now very smart and we saw improvements in viewership for our customers ranging between 20 and 40%, which obviously is a game changer.
Speaker #4: For a media company, again, just to stay on bright code, I'd rather go a little bit deeper on one or two businesses than provide you a quickly and shallow touchpoint on all.
Speaker #4: But we introduced in the backend, so basically the part of the product that the administrators and actual users on the customer side of things used to then reach their audience, their viewership.
Speaker #4: We introduced all sorts of agentic functionality you can now use an agent to perform previously menial and cumbersome tasks such as reordering videos and organizing things, finding videos, we have created a much more advanced layer for developers so that you don't necessarily have to go through the pretty good API that we had in place, but you can use an MCP to basically skip that and let your AI agents operate with bright code effectively.
Speaker #4: Yeah, the list is long. But generally speaking, what I just described for bright code would apply with the due adjustments to probably 80% of our businesses.
Speaker #4: So it's exciting. I will say it's still unclear. I don't think this is a Benny Spooner's thing. I think this is almost any company thing.
Speaker #4: Exactly to what extent these AI-enabled features translate into incremental revenue. We're seeing certainly we're seeing uplift here and there, but I wouldn't say we've seen massive uplift where all of a sudden a customer who was paying, say, 100 is willing to pay 200.
Speaker #4: Maybe they're willing to pay 110, which is good, but not transformative. Not a good news is that none of our strategies is in no way predicated on that being the case, but we'll keep an eye on it and we'll let you know if things change.
Speaker #1: I really appreciate that. Thank you.
Speaker #2: We are now going to proceed with our next question. The questions come from the line of Kirk Martin from Evercall. Please ask your question.
Speaker #3: Yeah, thanks very much. And thanks for taking the question. I guess my question would be with Airtable adding some enterprise sales motion to a portfolio that's traditionally been a little bit more weighted to consumer and self-service.
Speaker #3: Subscription businesses, should we view this as a bit of a shift in your M&A philosophy towards more enterprise, or is this just one example?
Speaker #3: And obviously a very big M&A pipeline you all have. I'm just kind of curious if there's any kind of longer-term shift we would expect to see you all go a little bit more towards enterprise just given maybe the machinations and the M&A market right now.
Speaker #3: Thanks.
Speaker #4: Thank you. Great question. So we even before Airtable we served we were serving we are serving many more businesses than people necessarily realize. We believe it's difficult to draw a precise line, but we believe that approximately 50% of our revenue comes from consumers and about 50% from professional businesses, enterprises.
Speaker #4: Again, it's difficult sometimes to know whether something is a how big a company is. You don't always have the precise data, but I think that directionally accurate.
Speaker #4: It's just that some of the more well-known brands we own are consumer brands. Consumer brands tend to be better known in the market for obvious reasons.
Speaker #4: And so I think that's why people think about Benny Spooner's primarily consumer, but it's not as skewed toward consumer as people think. Having said that, there has been a shift over time.
Speaker #4: We acquired bright code in early '25. We acquired Vimeo in late '25, which is has a big enterprise component. To it. And we signed the acquisition of Airtable, which is primarily enterprise.
Speaker #4: And so we have not shifted toward enterprise because of a thematic view. Our guiding principle is to take every dollar we have available, whether it's free cash flow or prudent levels of debt or opportunistically could also be equity.
Speaker #4: We've done that occasionally. And put it to use in the most efficient way possible to try to generate as much value for our shareholders over a window of maybe 10 years, a very long term.
Speaker #4: And so and we focus on being as good as possible that perfect operating machine when it comes to running these businesses because that's how we can pay attractive prices that are attractive to the sellers.
Speaker #4: And at the same time, deliver the high returns, I believe we have consistently over time. So that's the part we control and how we think about things.
Speaker #4: The rest is really what the market offers. And so in our view, most enterprise house businesses were valued at irrationally high levels until somewhat recently where we don't again, it's just our view, but at least looking at these businesses through the lens of someone who's trying to make money through free cash flow over the long run rather than speculating on reselling at the same or a better multiple.
Speaker #4: We never saw those prices as making any sense. Whatever the reason, as the market has shifted and prices are now more reasonable, sometimes still high in my view, but overall I'd say more reasonable.
Speaker #4: We're finding more opportunities to acquire some of these businesses, which can often be wonderful. I think Airtable we have plenty of respect for Airtable.
Speaker #4: We think it's an absolutely wonderful business and there is a very competent team there. At price that are appealing. So I think if the boundary conditions remain similar as in valuations remain similar you would probably see us do more of this sort of thing.
Speaker #4: But not because we like it more now than we did two years ago simply because considering the price now it's more reasonable for us to achieve really high returns.
Speaker #3: Thank you. Helpful.
Speaker #2: We are now going to proceed with our next question. And the questions come from the line of Alec Brundleau from Wells Fargo please ask your question.
Speaker #5: Yeah, hey, thanks so much. I appreciate the question. I think you started increasing AOL prices for customers at the end of June. Could you quantify the magnitude of the price uplift and help us understand how customers have responded to the increase thus far?
Speaker #5: Thank you.
Speaker #4: Thanks. Thanks for the question. So we run experiments not just on prices but dozens of different variables across all of our products all time.
Speaker #4: At all times. Last year we ran I believe 3,000 or 3,500 experiments. Probably over 10,000 throughout our history. So if you could pick pretty much any one of our businesses and products and almost at any particular point in time you could find someone with whom we're experimenting on new prices, new feature sets, new experiences, new let's say structures of free versus premium features and so on and so forth.
Speaker #4: That's just for context for those who don't know necessarily Benny Spooner's all that well. We try to be to run our businesses as scientists would and that big part of that is being experimental.
Speaker #4: Now with AOL it's true we have been experimenting with a number of things including pricing and it's too early to draw definitive conclusions. We'll share any such conclusions once we have them.
Speaker #4: But so far we're seeing promising responses across multiple different configurations in our experiments. So stay tuned.
Speaker #5: Thank you.
Speaker #2: We are now going to proceed with our next question. The questions come from the line of James Haney from Jefferies please ask your question.
Speaker #3: Excellent. Appreciate you having me on. It'd be great if you could talk about the progress you've seen out of Bend Bright. Curious what specific changes you've made since acquiring the asset and how that's kind of impacted metrics like usage, revenue, profitability.
Speaker #3: Thank you.
Speaker #4: Yep. Sorry. Here I am. I was unmuting. Yeah. Thank you. Eventbrite very recent acquisition. We closed it in March a few months ago. Very happy with it so far.
Speaker #4: I would say it's lived up to our expectations. Maybe exceeded our expectations a little bit overall. We completed a deep reorganization of the company.
Speaker #4: We published that news a few months ago. Which we believe was important to set things up for long-term success. We have a leaner team and we think is better positioned to progress rapidly now on both technology and product and then from there monetization.
Speaker #4: We have shipped around 40 improvements on the product there is an interesting blog post I think people can go and check that details say significant number of these 40 improvements I'm not going to go through all of them because I don't think a lot of the audience here is a ticketing geek but I would say that the overall angle is we spent a lot of time with customers and collected a long list of pain points.
Speaker #4: Some small, some bigger ones and we just got to work aggressively solving these problems. We improved the reliability of the entire platform. There were issues with loading times and bugs just one of countless examples now.
Speaker #4: If you create an event loading times are roughly 40% faster so for people who create hundreds of events over a year that's a very nice improvement.
Speaker #4: We improved creator tools. There's now all sorts of new functionality to manage if you're an organizer your checkout is a critical moment of the ticket sale experience obviously.
Speaker #4: We have improved event discovery in different ways. Among others we have completely redesigned the profile page for creators. On and on. I really recommend taking a look at the blog post and in general you can follow us.
Speaker #4: We try to make sure that each of our businesses at least the main ones publishes a reasonable not reasonable sorry important or significant product improvements so that people can keep an eye on our work.
Speaker #4: But we're quite excited about the amount of work that we have done considering just how recently we acquired it. We also that was product just done.
Speaker #4: So then we managed to improve monetization from advertising by approximately 20%. Now advertising is a smaller component of Eventbrite overall revenue but that's 20% improvement still translates into low single digit growth.
Speaker #4: It's nice it's good for organizers too because essentially the service here is that we're helping them get more visibility for their events. We managed to lower paid user acquisition spend by approximately 30% without impacting any let's say top of funnel metrics we found different pockets of unprofitable expenditure and got rid of those.
Speaker #4: And then we migrated the backhand to a more modern infrastructure. So we're rewriting all the let's say underlying core components. We believe this will be important as we look to accelerate product innovation and also our ability to iterate quickly on the different aspects of the user experience and monetization.
Speaker #4: So I think an exciting start. We'll see. I believe we'll have something more substantive to show over the next few quarters. Still a little bit early.
Speaker #4: But so far so good.
Speaker #3: Thank you.
Speaker #2: We are now going to proceed with the next question. The questions come from the line of Umar Dziki from Bank of America. Please ask your question.
Speaker #5: Hi. Hi. Thank you. I'd like to double click into AOL and specifically your comments around advertising you said that advertising was ahead of your expectations and I was hoping you could give a little bit more color as to why for example was it related to the market?
Speaker #5: Was it something that you did to the assets or the technology? And when you say it was ahead of your expectations did it grow or was it down for example?
Speaker #5: If you could just give us some more color around what happened there we'd appreciate it. Thank you.
Speaker #4: Sure. Thank you for the question. So yeah it did grow. I don't think we can take certainly not for it. Some credit but not full credit.
Speaker #4: Some of it is just probably fortunate fluctuations in some of the underlying phenomena. Yeah. So I mean we advertising on AOL we have a pretty ambitious plan and we believe that's one is creating the appropriate foundations and foundations so that we can max out advertising.
Speaker #4: It's a pretty long discussion that I would I think it can be reduced to essentially two branches. One hand we need to greatly improve our ability to serve interesting content to our users particularly on the web portal.
Speaker #4: For emailing that's really up to all of us sending interesting emails. So please try harder. But with the web portal we have a lot of leverage.
Speaker #4: We want to make sure that we improve the selection of content, the recommender system, so that people find it more pleasant to spend time on the portal.
Speaker #4: And there's tens of millions of people who are very loyal users of that portal. And that alone we could talk about it for a long time but I think one of the interesting opportunities is to use modern technology and AI to find better recommendations for people.
Speaker #4: And so we're working on that. We completely rewrote the content management system like 100% rewritten from scratch. And that will be one of the building blocks for this future optimization.
Speaker #4: The other big branch of optimizing advertising revenue because that just describe hopefully would give you engagement and retention. And then the other part is to actually select inventory properly and have more ad tech so for that one we also completely rebuilt the advertising technology stack from scratch.
Speaker #4: We are now in the process of deploying it by set gradually because it's a risky change. We incorporated some revenue disruption in our guidance precisely for this reason.
Speaker #4: Even if we do it perfectly we believe there will be some revenue disruption clearly we believe this is ultimately very very net positive in the long run but it could be slightly negative in the very short run.
Speaker #4: So that's the overall approach. But yeah we remain at least as excited about AOL as we were when we acquired it. It's certainly a nice asset.
Speaker #5: Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker #2: We are now going to take our next question. The questions come from the line of Yi Fuli from StoneX. Please ask your question.
Speaker #6: Thank you to the entire bending spoons management team for taking my questions and congrats on a very strong start as a public traded company.
Speaker #6: So Luca in the beginning of the conversation you spoke about sustainability of the business model and I think that's the biggest investor pushback we receive in the market.
Speaker #6: And you addressed it by pipeline talent spooners and capital financing right? So since 2023 management has generated exceptional acquisition returns so my question for Luca and team is what gives you confidence that bending spoon can continue generating similar returns at significantly larger scale?
Speaker #6: And what role does the proprietary operating system play in maintaining that advantage? Versus like traditional players like private equity firms, software acquirers? I mean you talked about old spooners earlier but just want to get your take and double click on this topic.
Speaker #6: Thank you.
Speaker #4: Thank you. Yeah. It's a critical topic. So what we know is that our returns have not so far deteriorated at least not in the last maybe acquisitions we did in 10 years ago a tiny acquisitions did even better but at least in the last three four maybe even five years we haven't seen a deterioration of returns.
Speaker #4: I'm if I were an investor I would assume returns will deteriorate in the future although we haven't seen any such deterioration simply because if we keep compounding at the current rate you guys have seen we've just posted another triple digit growth quarter and it's a long lease at this point a long sequence.
Speaker #4: This is so much faster to our knowledge than any serial acquiring history but like by a mile and so it's just reasonable to expect that there will be some deterioration in the growth rate although we haven't seen any signs of it yet.
Speaker #4: Now the good news is that even if we were to grow a lot more slowly it may still be incredibly fast by almost any measure.
Speaker #4: So there's plenty of room for deterioration to occur while still things being extremely exciting in our view from a capital allocation and investment perspective.
Speaker #4: Of course we do everything we can to achieve the highest possible returns for as long as possible. In fact we don't think about it as in how do we avoid any deterioration we think about it as in how can we make things even better.
Speaker #4: Like nobody it's not written in the stars that we can't find further pockets of improvement. So we believe the overall addressable market is large and we have not yet found that larger companies offer an inferior opportunity for optimization.
Speaker #4: The level of improvement we've been able to bring whether it's product technology team acquisitions is comparable to the one we were able to bring to smaller acquisitions.
Speaker #4: The financial results we have achieved so far appear to be in line with those previous acquisitions. So there doesn't seem to be a phenomenon necessarily where bigger means more difficult or worse.
Speaker #4: I mean probably more difficult yes but we also get better at what we do with our resources increase. So that's advantageous. We believe there's plenty of capital out there although we are not of course guaranteed to be able to access it but hopefully we can continue to serve our investors both lenders and shareholders at an excellent level.
Speaker #4: Plenty of people who want to participate so we hope that capital does not become a bottleneck in the next several years. Operational capacity is certainly a potential bottleneck.
Speaker #4: We are doing fine right now but as we mentioned in our remarks we cannot rule out the possibility that from time to time we may need to slow down to be able to hire more people and coach more people.
Speaker #4: The moment we're still seeing a pretty significant ramp up in terms of our ability to attract new talent we're just expanding in London opening in Madrid and Warsaw.
Speaker #4: We may be expanding in other geographies in the near term and that means tapping a potentially much much larger talent pool we still have plenty of room for increasing compensation with this quarter we have exceeded $4 4 million per spooner on our run rate basis in terms of revenue.
Speaker #4: So we try to set our compensation levels in an efficient way but if it means being able to attract a lot more great people we could easily raise compensation in a major way without critical impacting our overall economics and that supposedly should help us find even more great people.
Speaker #4: And yes the technological aspect of things remains a key focus for us. We believe we're just scratching the surface of what we can accomplish particularly with AI which is changing the rules of the game and we as far as we can tell we are at the very cutting edge of using AI in our operations.
Speaker #4: We have yet to see a company that does it better. I'm sure there is someone out there but we're pretty confident we're among the best in this area at a minimum.
Speaker #4: So are we certain we're not going to see deterioration? No. Would I recommend an investor a prudent investor to assume we don't see our returns deteriorate?
Speaker #4: No. I would say stay prudent assume some deterioration but do we see as of now signs of such deterioration happening? We don't. And we are as excited as ever to keep pushing.
Speaker #6: Well Luca like let's say if a deal market deteriorates right become less favorable let's just say right. If you just patiently wait you're going to the portfolio technically should generate higher cash flow continue consistent cash flow right.
Speaker #6: Would you patiently deliver the balance sheet if that's the case and that's it for me. Thank you very much. You're guaranteed.
Speaker #4: Sure. Thank you. So well we try to optimize our capital structure or maximum returns while keeping a risk profile that we consider very prudent.
Speaker #4: And so at all times we try to keep the perfect amount of leverage obviously it's not like there's an element of judgment there. We disclose that leverage ratio is around 2.4 times as of the end of the report quarter.
Speaker #4: We think that's an appropriate level of leverage. It could go up a little bit or go lower a little bit over time. Naturally if we were to pause acquisitions for whatever reason at some point you would presumably see our leverage ratio decline quite rapidly.
Speaker #4: And if we found particularly exciting opportunities for generating high returns for shareholders you may see our leverage ratio go up a little bit but I don't think you'll see it go up dramatically for sure.
Speaker #4: And so basically we just try to be mathematical overall in maximizing the rate of compounding and a significant component of that equation is picking the right sources of capital including it's interesting now that we're a publicly traded company there are interesting things we can do with our equity which we will be exploring in due course as opportunities arise.
Speaker #4: So every decision you see us make will be aimed at maximizing long-term returns while keeping risks at a at what we consider a very prudent level.
Speaker #4: Thank you very much.
Speaker #6: Thank you Luca and team. Congrats again.
Speaker #1: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time so I'll now hand back to the management team for closing remarks.
