Italian venture capital versus the UK market
Something extraordinary happened in the last week that forces a recalibration of any analysis comparing Italian and UK venture capital markets. Bending Spoons just raised $710 million in equity at an $11 billion pre-money valuation, simultaneously closing the acquisition of AOL with a $2.8 billion financing package from major global banks including JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Intesa Sanpaolo.
To put this in perspective: Bending Spoons, a single Italian company, has now accessed more capital in the last twelve months than the entire Italian VC market typically deploys in a year. The Italian VC market invested €759 million across 282 rounds in the first nine months of 2025, on track for roughly €1 billion annually. Bending Spoons alone has secured over €2.5 billion in combined equity and debt financing in 2025.
This isn't just a statistical anomaly. It's a different model operating at different scale, revealing both what's possible from Italy and why the broader ecosystem still struggles structurally.
The Bending Spoons phenomenon and what it actually means
Bending Spoons is now valued at nearly €10 billion, positioning it among Italy's top 30 companies by valuation if it were public, similar to TIM. The company has completed ten acquisitions since January 2024, including Vimeo for $1.38 billion, WeTransfer, Issuu, StreamYard, Meetup, Brightcove, Komoot, and MileIQ.
In 2024, Bending Spoons generated €623 million in revenue (+73%), with EBITDA more than doubled to €94 million and net profit of approximately €57 million. The company employs around 1,000 people from fifty nationalities and receives approximately 600,000 job applications annually.
The investment syndicate reads like a who's who of global institutional capital: T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, Durable Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Foxhaven Asset Management, and Radcliffe.
This is extraordinary. But here's what it tells us about the structural reality beneath the celebration:
Bending Spoons is the exception that proves the rule. One company accessing this level of capital doesn't indicate a functioning ecosystem. It indicates that exceptional companies can transcend dysfunctional ecosystems by building credibility directly with international institutional capital.
The model Bending Spoons has pioneered is revealing: it raised $600 million in venture debt in March 2025, then another €500 million in August, using this leverage to acquire established but underperforming global tech brands and turn them profitable. This is closer to private equity than traditional venture capital - and it works precisely because Bending Spoons generates actual cash flow and EBITDA, not just revenue growth.
But how many other Italian startups can replicate this model? How many have the operational excellence to generate €94 million EBITDA that justifies billion-dollar debt facilities?
The UK comparison shows the structural gap hasn't closed
The UK invested £9 billion in 2024 with 12.5% growth, remaining the third largest VC market globally behind only the US and China. As of 2025, UK VC supports over 378,000 jobs across more than 9,000 businesses.
Italy in the first nine months of 2025 invested €759 million across 282 rounds, on track to potentially exceed 400 rounds for the year. If this pace continues, 2025 could become the year with the highest number of deals in Italian VC history, potentially reaching €1 billion without mega-rounds (the 2024 total of €1.5 billion included Bending Spoons, D-Orbit, and Medical Microinstruments).
The UK market is 9x larger. But the more revealing comparison is structural, not scalar.
The mega-round drought reveals systemic incapacity
Here's the data point that matters: In Q3 2025, Italy registered no Series B rounds and no mega-rounds above €100 million. The largest deal was Exein at €70 million Series C, followed by Tretau at €20 million.
For the first time in two years, Q3 2025 saw no new fund announcements in Italy. Pre-seed and seed represented 68% of all rounds in Q3, continuing the pattern where Italy plants thousands of seeds but can't water the trees through growth stage.
Compare this to the UK: UK tech companies raised more than France and Germany combined in 2024, with notable megarounds including Wayve's £840 million Series C and Monzo's £340 million late-stage investment. AI alone attracted £1.8 billion across 282 deals in H1 2024, with 80 involving US investors.
The UK has the capital depth to support £50-200 million late-stage rounds at scale. Italy doesn't. As Emanuele Levi, President of CDP Venture Capital, stated: "Italy is an ecosystem in a delayed development phase and the fact that mega-rounds don't exist is a structural problem: either they emerge or we're destined not to complete ecosystem development."
What Bending Spoons reveals about the possible versus the systemic
Bending Spoons demonstrates that Italian entrepreneurs can build globally competitive tech companies that access billions in international capital. This is enormously important - it proves the talent and operational capability exist.
But Bending Spoons succeeded by essentially bypassing the Italian VC ecosystem. Look at the trajectory:
Since 2013, Bending Spoons raised approximately €560 million in equity from venture capital. Then it went directly to international institutional investors and global banks for the billions needed to execute its acquisition strategy. The recent $710 million equity round involved zero Italian institutional capital at scale - it was T. Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Cox Enterprises.
The company structure itself reveals the sophistication required: Bending Spoons reorganized by creating Bending Spoons Operations for the operational business and Bending Spoons Holdings as a holding company, enabling complex financial engineering that most Italian startups lack the expertise to execute.
This works for Bending Spoons. But how does a typical Italian startup in Series A or B stage access this level of international capital and structuring sophistication? They don't. They hit the late-stage capital wall and either die, get acquired cheap, or emigrate.
The IPO absence remains the fundamental structural failure
Despite Bending Spoons' success, the core structural problem hasn't changed: Italy registered zero VC-backed IPOs in 2024. Bending Spoons itself isn't public.
The UK had 18 IPOs in 2024. Not spectacular by historical standards, but 18 versus zero matters profoundly. UK VC-backed IPOs in 2024 included Raspberry Pi at £540 million valuation.
Without IPO capability, the Italian ecosystem lacks the liquidity events that create the flywheel: successful exits return capital to Limited Partners, who reinvest in new funds, which support new late-stage rounds, which create new IPO candidates. Bending Spoons' acquisitions generate value for its shareholders, but they don't create this systemic flywheel effect for the broader ecosystem.
The returns question that still has no transparent answer
UK VC funds with 2002-2019 vintages generated a pooled TVPI multiple of 1.87, compared to 2.01 in the US and 1.96 in rest of Europe. The UK's pooled DPI of 0.72 is lower than both US (1.06) and ROE (0.81).
These aren't great returns. But at least the UK measures and publishes this data transparently. In Italy, we still don't know whether venture capital actually generates value or whether returns derive from simple transfer of value between founders and VCs.
Bending Spoons will likely generate spectacular returns for its investors - Tamburi Investment Partners sold less than 9% of its stake for €27 million, twenty times its invested capital, with its remaining stake now worth approximately €300 million. But one successful company doesn't demonstrate that the broader ecosystem generates competitive returns.
When I was managing digital transitions in Italian creative industries in the '90s, I saw the same pattern: occasional spectacular successes that got celebrated intensely, while the systemic returns across the broader sector remained opaque and likely mediocre. The spectacular successes don't invalidate concerns about systemic value creation - they often distract from addressing them.
The AI investment gap shows systemic response incapacity
In the UK, AI accounted for £1.8 billion investment across 282 deals in H1 2024. In Italy, AI was only the sixth investment trend with €155 million in 2024, down from €193 million in 2023.
When a major technological wave creates opportunity, the UK ecosystem can rapidly redirect billions toward it. The Italian ecosystem can't match this velocity or scale. In 2025, software, smart city, and fintech sectors dominated Italian VC investment, but without the mega-rounds that signal major bets on transformative technology.
Bending Spoons is investing in AI - but as a successful scaled company acquiring AI capabilities through M&A, not as part of a vibrant AI startup funding ecosystem.
What the UK has that Italy doesn't despite Bending Spoons
The UK isn't perfect - 62% of UK fund managers view exit opportunities as poor or very poor, and pooled TVPI multiples fell from 1.73 to 1.61 in 2024. But structural elements create compounding advantages:
Capital scale enables late-stage support. £8 billion in UK VC means approximately £1.6 billion available for late-stage rounds. Italy's €1 billion total means perhaps €150-200 million for late-stage - insufficient to support meaningful pipeline.
International capital circulation creates discipline. UK saw 340 deals with US investors in H1 2024 totaling £5.6 billion, with key American VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Lightspeed active. This brings capital, valuation discipline, best practices, and global market connections.
Transparent returns data enables learning. UK publishes detailed data showing where the system succeeds and fails - like life sciences funds underperforming on TVPI (1.76 vs 1.99 wider market) but outperforming on DPI (1.14 vs 1.02). Italy's opacity prevents systematic improvement.
Functional IPO pipeline provides credible exit path. Despite challenges, the UK maintains a functioning IPO market that provides liquidity at scale. Italy's zero IPOs mean founders know from day one their likely exit is acquisition.
Pension fund engagement. UK pension funds committed 7.8% of total VC fundraising in 2024, mostly from overseas schemes. Italy lacks comparable institutional LP base, remaining 69% dependent on domestic sources versus 43% in Germany and 56% in France.
The uncomfortable conclusion Bending Spoons doesn't change
Bending Spoons proves that exceptional Italian companies can succeed at global scale. This matters enormously. But one exceptional company doesn't indicate a functioning ecosystem - it indicates that exceptional companies can transcend dysfunctional ecosystems.
The structural reality remains: Italy invested €759 million across 282 rounds in the first nine months of 2025, with 68% in pre-seed/seed, zero Series B rounds in Q3, and no mega-rounds. For the first time in two years, no new funds were announced in Q3 2025.
The Series B and C "bottleneck" remains critical - these rounds historically represent only 20% of total Italian VC activity. This isn't improving. It's the structural constraint that prevents most Italian startups from reaching the scale where they could access Bending Spoons-level capital.
The UK market, despite its own challenges, operates at 9x Italian scale with functioning late-stage capital, international LP base, transparent returns data, and credible IPO pipeline. Italian VC represents only 0.06% of GDP versus 0.20% in Germany, 0.26% in France, and 0.12% in Spain.
After over a decade and billions invested, if you have three unicorns (Bending Spoons, Satispay, Scalapay), zero IPOs, and one company accessing most of the meaningful late-stage capital, the problem isn't "we need more time." The problem is systemic design.
Bending Spoons shows what's possible when exceptional execution meets international capital. But building an ecosystem requires hundreds of companies accessing growth capital, not one exceptional company bypassing the ecosystem entirely.
The test isn't whether Italy can produce one world-class tech company. Clearly it can. The test is whether the ecosystem can systematically support dozens of companies through late-stage growth to create the flywheel effect that compounds over decades.
On that measure, Bending Spoons' spectacular success is an inspiration - and a reminder of how far the broader ecosystem remains from systematic value creation at competitive European scale.