Bending Spoons S.p.A.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Bending Spoons Q2 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, please press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 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 answer questions. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your first speaker, James Caldwell, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and hello, everyone. Welcome to Bending Spoons Q2 2026 earnings conference call. With us today to discuss our results are Luca Ferrari, co-founder and CEO, and Enrico Martinelli, co-CFO. So the Q&A portion of the call will also be joined by Davide Scarpazza, co-CFO, Francesco Mancone, CTO, and Francesco Patarnello, co-founder and head of M&A. But before we begin, let me cover the safe harbour statement. Some of the information you'll hear today will consist of forward-looking statements, including those regarding our objectives and outlook. 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. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. During the call, we'll discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. You can find the definitions of our non-GAAP financial measures together with reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in today's earnings press release. which is available on the Bending Spoons Investor Relations website at investors.bendingspoons.com. Unless we say otherwise, all comparisons refer to year-over-year results. And now, over to you, Luca.

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? Our playbook is simple. We acquire digital businesses, undertake deep integrations and transformations to improve them, and reinvest the cash they generate together with incremental leverage in further acquisitions. 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. At its foundation is what we call our platform, which consists of three elements, our people, are proprietary technologies and our proprietary data. Today, our platform brings together nearly 700 selectively recruited core team members whom we call Spooners. Powerful internally developed technologies spanning everything from A-B testing to A-I model orchestration and valuable insights accumulated through more than 50 acquisitions and thousands of experiments. 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% levered IRR hurdles in our underwriting process. Through the execution of our playbook, we've more than tripled revenue, operating income, and adjusted operating income in the two years to 2025. I'll turn now to Q2 2026, where we delivered a similar level of growth. 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%. Diluted earnings per share was 28 cents, up 163%. And adjusted earnings per share was 46 cents, up 167%. Operationally, we made encouraging progress in the transformations of AOL, Eventbrite, and Vmail. During the quarter, we released more than 70 product improvements across these three businesses. We also made substantial progress modernizing their underlying technologies, creating a stronger foundation for a faster pace of product development and monetization improvement. We continued to strengthen our proprietary technologies, added dozens of spooners to our team, expanded our sources of financing, completed the acquisition of Tractive for an enterprise value of $759 million and undertook negotiations to acquire Airtable. We'd asked last week announcing we had reached an agreement to acquire the business for an enterprise value of $1.29 billion. 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, a natural question is how far Bendis Spoons can scale and what could ultimately limit that growth. We think about this constantly and see at least three potential constraints. The availability of attractive acquisition opportunities, our operational capacity to integrate and transform and acquire businesses, and access to capital at reasonable terms. 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. Our 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 a thousand digital businesses that could be attractive targets over the next several years. 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 as strong as at any point in our history. However, to maximize our prospect 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 whose acquisitions we can underwrite with conviction. 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 Thank you for joining us today. However, it also incorporates a physical device, giving us an opportunity to deepen our capabilities in areas such as hardware design, device connectivity, supply and chain management, and support for an installed base. Success with Tractive 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. The strength of its brand and product It's positive revenue trajectory and a still sizable opportunity in the category all contributed to our decision to acquire the business. A substantial portion of Airtable's revenue is generated through the self-serve channel, again an area very familiar to us. However, the pending acquisition would also create an opportunity for us to deepen our experience serving enterprise customers through direct sales. Enterprise SaaS is included in our $400 billion addressable market estimate. and we already have a foundation in this area through Brightcove and Vmail. 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. The second potential constraint is the operational capacities required to undertake the deep integrations and transformations that are often needed to achieve or 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. 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. 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. During its first three weeks of general availability, Oldspooner processed more than 100 billion tokens. The speed of adoption and its effectiveness have been encouraging. I personally had some wow moments with Oldspooner. During Q2, we also introduced AI-enabled interactive tasks into parts of our recruiting process. Our testing indicates that these tasks provide a predictive input into candidate assessment. They also make our recruiting process more scalable. These initiatives build on the 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. In Q2, revenue per spooner exceeded $4 million on an annualized basis. were also undertaking increasingly large transformations without a comparable increase in the number of spooners deployed. For instance, around 60 spooners worked on Vimeo during Q2, broadly in line with the number of spooners who worked on the Evernote transformation in 2023. This is despite Vimeo being roughly four times the size of Evernote in revenue terms and a more complicated business from both a technical and operational perspective. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 based on the quarter end exchange rate. After a quarter end, we secured a further 590 million euros of term loan financing, increased our revolving credit facility by another 30 million euros, and received net proceeds of 1.10 billion dollars from our IPO. These actions, together with our existing cash balances and the cash we expect our businesses to continue generating, provide sufficient funding for the pending air table acquisition while preserving flexibility to pursue additional acquisitions that meet our return thresholds. We intend to exercise that flexibility while maintaining plenty of headroom under our debt covenants and sufficient liquidity to meet our obligations in a range of downside scenarios. 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. With that, I'll hand the call over to Enrico to discuss our financial results in greater detail.