Bending spoonshe Milan-based technology conglomerate that made headlines for acquiring companies such as AOL and Vimeo floated on the Nasdaq this week, briefly reaching a market capitalization of more than $25 billion.
While Bending Spoons’ stock has fallen slightly since then, its market capitalization remains double its previous private valuation of $11 billion, confirming investor appetite for its playbook and portfolio, which includes digital brands like Meetup, Eventbrite and WeTransfer.
Bending Spoons’ strategy shares similarities with private equity, except that it retains the brands it acquires. It focuses on making them more financially successful — with technology and artificial intelligence, but also often through controversial price increases and layoffs.
Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli said some of the scrutiny was due to the fact that products like Evernote were really loved by their users. However, he said that despite all the changes, customer retention was “remarkably stable”.
Bending Spoons’ own user base has grown significantly in its 13 years of existence, and especially in the last two years. As of March 2026, its portfolio served over 500 million monthly active users and over 9 million paying monthly customers, according to .
This also contradicts the idea that Bending Spoons is buying up dead companies, a narrative that entrepreneur Joe Hyrkin has been fighting since he sold digital publishing platform Issuu to the Italians in 2024.
“‘Old Internet brands’ is the wrong context,” says Hyrkin on LinkedIn after the IPO. “They take products with real customer behavior and then integrate them into a centralized system of product, engineering, data, monetization, artificial intelligence and operations discipline.” That seems to be working: Bending Spoons reported $1.31 billion in revenue in 2025. But its market cap suggests investors expect even more.
How did Bending Spoons get started?
The little-known story is that Bending Spoons was born out of the remnants of Evertale, a Copenhagen-based startup that participated in Disrupt SF 2011’s Startup Alley and raised funding for its photo-sharing app, Wink.
Evertale failed shortly thereafter and the investors were able to exit, but its founders and some employees continued to work together, initially on internal applications. Soon enough, the team made its first acquisition, followed by many others, CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari told the venture podcast 20VC in one of his rare interviews before the company decides to go public.
In 2020, Bending Spoons made an exception to its policy of no longer manufacturing its own products when it created and donated Immuni, Italy’s official COVID-19 contact tracing app. But other than that, he’s mostly honed a formula: spotting a popular product he believes can be improved inside and out and buying it from owners who have reached their limits in some way.
This approach has long been orthogonal to VC, and Bending Spoons remained bootstrapped for years. But it eventually raised equity financing several timesincluding 2025. Before the IPO, it also had VIP backers such as tech industry bigwigs Eric Schmidt, Mike Krieger and Xavier Niel. and stars Andre Agassi, Bradley Cooper, Maluma, The Weeknd and The Chainsmokers.
What happens after a Bending Spoons acquisition?
After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the user experience and product capabilities, as well as the underlying technology. monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount.
While this focus on efficiency and revenue coincides with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: “It intends to hold forever and has never sold an acquired business.” He’s building a living portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard.
What companies has Bending Spoons acquired?
While Bending Spoons acquired several companies between 2014 and 2021, including AI-powered photo enhancer Remini, its most notable acquisitions have been more recent.
In a deal also announced in 2022 and completed in early 2023, Bending Spoons also acquired Evernote, the note-taking app that was reportedly valued at $1 billion before running into trouble. The acquisition was followed by layoffs, as well as cuts to Evernote’s free offering.
The first half of next year, 2024, was particularly active, with acquisition of Meetupapp creator Mosaic Teamand everything is done within six months.
In July 2024, it acquired the publishing platform
In November 2024, Bending Spoons announced it would spend $233 million in a private deal to acquire video platform Brightcove. The acquisitions continued apace in early 2025, with Komoot route planner and management software manufacturer Harvest.
Bending Spoons also announced its intention to acquire Vimeo in a $1.38 billion cash deal, and soon after, to acquire AOL from Yahoo for an undisclosed amount. (Disclosure: Both AOL and Yahoo are former owners of TechCrunch, and Yahoo retains a small interest.)
In December 2025, Bending Spoons announced that it would acquire yet another well-known brand: Eventbrite — and only for about $500 million, a far cry from the company’s price $1.76 billion valuation when it went public in 2018.
The Vimeo deal closed in the second half of 2025 and was followed by massive layoffs that affected most of the workforce, including the entire video team. The acquisitions of AOL, Eventbrite and were completed this year as well.
What’s next for Bending Spoons?
Four of Bending Spoons’ co-founders have remained at its helm over the years: Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello and Luca Querella. The IPO made them billionaires, at least on paper, while retaining control of the company, with more than 80% of the voting power.
Some of their decisions will affect employees. According to the company, it added “1,830 full-time equivalent team members through the acquisitions of AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo,” but has already “parted ways” with many and will continue. “Once the transformations of the three businesses are substantially complete later in 2026, we expect only a few hundred to remain.”
This reduction in headcount will obviously not affect the number of “Spooners” – the term Bending Spoons is reserved for certain key team members who have gone through the highly selective recruitment process. There are currently some 620 of them, but that number hasn’t grown fast: in 2025, it only made 286 hires out of some 800,000 job applications.
Core headcount may not have increased by much, but productivity has. “Helped in part by advances in artificial intelligence, revenue per Spooner FTE increased from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025 and was $0.97 million in the first quarter of 2026,” the company said. It helped it escape the SaaS reckoning it now also hopes to benefit from.
Despite what it sees as a favorable moment, Bending Spoons has remained selective in its acquisitions, but keeps on a wide net. With its own reporting, it sourced more than 2,500 acquisition opportunities in 2025, conducted in-depth analysis of approximately 200 of them, and completed six acquisitions. More will certainly follow — that’s the playbook.
“We have identified more than 1,000 digital businesses (both private and public) that could be attractive acquisition targets in the future, representing nearly $400 billion in total estimated revenue in 2025,” Ferrari wrote in a letter on behalf of the Bending Spoons team.
The playbook hasn’t changed, but the take-privates hint is a reminder that the company has gone from paying “$10,000 for our first acquisition” to now “pursuing billion-dollar acquisitions.”
What follows may be even more intense. “As AI enables us to achieve more with fewer people, the scalability of our acquisition and transformation model should also improve,” predicted Ferrari.
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