When the Experience Economy Speaks Italian: Bending Spoons Takes Eventbrite and Redefines the Global Events Market

Marc Griffith
Dec 2, 2025
3 min read

Eventbrite passes into Italian hands: the agreement for acquisition by Bending Spoons is far more than a financial operation—it's a signal of how the global events market, both online and offline, is changing once again. In this landscape fit stories and ambitions of Italian realities like Evensi, which from Modena have helped redefine how we discover what's happening around us.

The Deal: Eventbrite + Bending Spoons

Eventbrite has entered a definitive agreement to be acquired by Bending Spoons in an all-cash transaction worth about $500 million; shareholders will receive $4.50 per share, an over 80% premium to the 60-day average. Upon closing, expected in the first half of 2026, Eventbrite will delist from Wall Street and become a private company within the Milan-based group's portfolio.

For Bending Spoons, which recently acquired Vimeo, Brightcove, Meetup, and Evernote, Eventbrite is a key piece to consolidate an ecosystem of digital platforms connected to live experiences and content. Declared intentions focus on dedicated messaging, AI to simplify event creation, better search, and a structured secondary ticketing system.

An Events Market in Full Relaunch

After pandemic years, the global live events ticketing market has surpassed pre-2020 levels and continues growing: valued over $80 billion in 2024, it's projected to exceed $110 billion by 2032. Within this, online event ticketing nears $30 billion in 2024 and could double by 2030, driven by mobile, automation, and content personalization.

Italy holds a surprisingly strong position: per the latest "Stati Generali degli Eventi," the country ranks second worldwide after the US for major annual events, with 635 international initiatives in 2024 and a supply chain value over €1 billion, forecasted to grow to €1.18 billion in 2025. This sector spans not just fairs and congresses, but a dense fabric of festivals, concerts, hybrid formats, and local initiatives fueling tourism, hospitality, and creative industries.

From Global Platforms to Italian Initiatives

If Eventbrite became the global marketplace for "shared experiences," distributing over 83 million paid tickets in 2024 for more than 4.7 million events, its strength lay in scaling a self-service model for small and medium organizers. Bending Spoons' push could now amplify this, bringing data-driven, mobile-first logic to a global scale, aligned with the Milan group's DNA.

Meanwhile, Italy has produced a generation of tech-driven platforms like Evensi, a geolocalized event search engine using proprietary algorithms and AI to match interests and content, originating from Emilia-Romagna. Evensi's 2022 acquisition by Events.com highlighted how Italian innovation in event discovery can become a strategic asset for international players seeking recommendation and promotion tech.

Italy, Natural Lab for Live Experiences

The density of art cities, cultural festivals, trade fairs, and major sports formats makes Italy an ideal lab for testing new "event discovery" forms, physical-digital integration, and advanced monetization models. Here, an Italian group like Bending Spoons entering the helm of a global platform like Eventbrite opens intriguing scenarios for local and regional ecosystems, from innovation hubs to startups in ticketing, analytics, AI, and experiential marketing.

For those building products in the events industry, the message is clear: the center of gravity is no longer just database ownership or ticket issuance, but orchestrating communities, data, and content across platforms with portfolio and cross-brand synergy logics. In this new cycle, stories of Evensi, Events.com, and Eventbrite—now with strong Italian accent—suggest the next innovation wave in the sector may arise from blending event culture, technology, and global ecosystem building starting from specific territories.

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