AOL will soon have a new owner. Bending Spoons, the Italian software company that has bought up a range of other digital businesses like Evernote, MeetUp, WeTransfer, and soon Vimeo, announced plans to purchase AOL from Yahoo after securing a $2.8 billion debt financing package.
Over the past couple of decades, AOL has been passed from company to company, merging with Time Warner in 2001 before getting spun off and sold to Verizon in 2015 for $4.4 billion. Verizon merged AOL and Yahoo into a new company, called Oath, which it offloaded to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for around $5 billion in 2021. AOL was placed under the Yahoo umbrella following the acquisition.
AOL still offers a web portal and email service, though it recently shut down dial-up internet service after more than three decades.
Bending Spoons has made a flurry of acquisitions in recent years, a few of which were followed by layoffs and, in some cases, higher prices for customers. The company expects its acquisition of AOL to close by the end of this year, with CEO Luca Ferrari saying that Bending Spoons will “invest significantly to help the product and business flourish.”
Even though it’s hard not to think about which company will acquire AOL next, Ferrari says in the press release that Bending Spoons has “never sold an acquired business,” and will serve AOL’s “large, loyal customer base for many years to come.”