Manager / Luca Ferrari, from a Veronese boy's dream to a billion-dollar tech empire: who is the Italian who leads Bending Spoons?

For once, an Italian company is dominating international finance and technology headlines. Bending Spoons , the Milan-based mobile application development company, is in talks with Yahoo (controlled by Apollo Global Management) to acquire America Online (AOL) , one of the most iconic brands of the early American internet. If successful, this deal will definitively establish the company founded by Luca Ferrari as a global player in the digital economy.

But who is this young entrepreneur from Verona who, in just over ten years, has led a group of Italian engineers to build an empire worth $2.55 billion by 2024, with a turnover of $706 million and over 300 million monthly users on his apps?

Ferrari was born in 1985 in Settimo di Pescantina , a small village nestled in the Verona countryside. The only child of a hairdressing couple, as a boy he didn't yet know what it meant to be an entrepreneur, but he nurtured the dream of building "something big." After graduating in engineering in Padua , he decided to continue his studies in Denmark , at the Technical University of Denmark . It was there that he met the future co-founders of Bending Spoons, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella , and the Polish Tomasz Greber.

The name chosen for their startup is no coincidence. "Bending Spoons" harks back to a famous scene from the 1999 film The Matrix , in which a shaved-headed boy in a monk's habit bends a spoon using only his mind. Ferrari was 14 when he saw the film, and that scene became a symbol: what seems impossible can be achieved through discipline, commitment, and vision.

That same philosophy would guide his life and work: bending what seems rigid, transforming limitations into opportunities, using the mind to go beyond the imaginable. The journey, however, didn't begin with a masterstroke. In 2010, Ferrari and his teammates launched their first startup, Evertale , a digital diary that wrote itself thanks to artificial intelligence. The project raised €1 million from a venture capital fund, but soon proved unsustainable.

With only 40,000 euros left in the coffers , the group decided to try again: in 2013, Bending Spoons was born. This time, the idea worked: the company grew rapidly and became one of the most important app developers in the world, reaching its current billion-dollar valuation.

Ferrari was among the first to understand that the smartphone wasn't a gadget, but an object destined to replace entire industries. This vision drove Bending Spoons to develop apps capable of taking full advantage of the new digital era. Some, like Remini (an AI-based photo editor) and Splice (video editing), have won over millions of users worldwide.

"We buy a tech company, imagine what it should be like to be as successful as possible over the long term, and work to make that vision a reality," Ferrari explains. It's a pragmatic and ambitious approach, which has led Bending Spoons to acquire platforms like Meetup.

The key, according to Ferrari, is corporate culture : a motivated, collaborative, and resilient team, capable of adapting to different projects with the same tools and principles. But Luca Ferrari isn't just an entrepreneur obsessed with numbers. He's a voracious reader (up to 50 books a year), a vegan for ethical and environmental reasons, and has a daily routine that includes exercise, family time, and listening to audiobooks.

Of course, not everything was a success. During the pandemic, Bending Spoons developed the Immuni contact tracing app for the government, but it didn't have the desired impact. Ferrari still considers it an important step: "We dedicated a third of the company to Immuni for months, free of charge, and we faced a lot of criticism. But if our civic sense inspired it, then it was worth it."

Despite starting out in Copenhagen, Ferrari chose to base his company in Milan , aiming to demonstrate that it's possible to build global technology champions in Italy too. "If we had succeeded starting in Denmark, the impact would have been less. Italy has enormous potential that just needs to be unleashed." But he doesn't mince words about the country: "Italy isn't yet as much of a country for young people as it should be. We're too traditionalist, too averse to change. If we want a bright future, we must learn to innovate."

Whether acquiring AOL, launching an app, or reinventing an industry, Ferrari always moves with the same philosophy: bending the impossible with the power of the mind. An approach that, in little more than a decade, has transformed a group of students into one of Europe's most successful tech unicorns . Perhaps to truly describe it, it's enough to return to that scene from The Matrix: the spoon doesn't exist. Only the ability to imagine and build a new world exists.

READ ALSO: Bending Spoons in talks with Yahoo to buy AOL: $1.4 billion at stake to buy a piece of Internet history