Italian tech company promises to make America Online great again

Dial-up dinosaur finds yet another corporate home as Yahoo waves goodbye

Bending Spoons, an Italian tech biz, is buying AOL from Yahoo, funded by a $2.8 billion debt financing package that will also bankroll future acquisitions.

The purchase price remains undisclosed. Bending Spoons (BS) CEO Luca Ferrari estimates AOL has 8 million daily and 30 million monthly active users, making it "one of the top-ten most-used email providers in the world."

Ferrari pledged to "invest significantly to help the product and the business flourish." AOL has had numerous different owners since 2001 but that stops now, BS claimed.

"We intend to invest significantly to help the product and the business flourish," he added, "Bending Spoons has never sold an acquired business—we're confident we're the right long-term steward for AOL, and look forward to serving its large, loyal customer base for many years to come."

BS has pursued an aggressive acquisition strategy. It bought file transfer service WeTransfer in 2024, reportedly cutting 75 percent of staff afterward. Its 2022 purchase of note-taking app Evernote was followed by restrictions on free-tier users to drive paid subscriptions.

AOL's four-decade history includes a dramatic rise and falls - it was once the Internet as far as its millions of customers were concerned. AOL arguably reached its peak with the dawning of the new century. The company bought the Netscape browser in 1998, and Time Warner in 2000 at the height of its powers, before a lengthy decline set in.

As the dial-up service, on which AOL was founded, dwindled in favor of broadband, its fortunes waned. In 2009, AOL was spun out of Time Warner, and in 2015, it was acquired by Verizon. Verizon later bought Yahoo! and merged the two before tiring of the whole enterprise and selling the pair to Apollo Global Management in 2021.

Which brings us to the Bending Spoons acquisition.

"This transaction will allow us to focus more deeply on the aggressive roadmaps we have planned for Yahoo's core products moving forward, while ensuring AOL continues to thrive under new ownership," said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo.

AOL recently switched off the last bits of its dial-up network. The number of customers affected by the termination was said to be in the low thousands. ®