Milan-based tech conglomerate Bending Spoons, the owner of AOL, Vimeo, and Evernote, went public on the Nasdaq this week, briefly reaching a market capitalization exceeding $25 billion. While the stock has since pulled back slightly, its valuation remains roughly double its previous private valuation of $11 billion, signaling strong investor appetite for its distinctive acquisition-and-transformation strategy.
Bending Spoons’ portfolio includes digital brands such as Meetup, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, and Brightcove. Its approach shares similarities with private equity, but with a key difference: it aims to hold onto the brands it acquires indefinitely. The focus is on making them more financially successful through technology and AI, but also through controversial price hikes and layoffs.
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Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli said some of the scrutiny was due to the fact that products such as Evernote were genuinely loved by their users. He said that despite all the changes, customer retention has been “remarkably stable.”
As of March 2026, Bending Spoons’ portfolio served over 500 million monthly active users and more than 9 million monthly paying customers, according to its filing. This data counters the narrative that Bending Spoons acquires dead companies, a perception that entrepreneur Joe Hyrkin has been battling since selling digital publishing platform Issuu to the Italians in 2024.
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“’Old internet brands’ is the wrong frame,” Hyrkin wrote on LinkedIn after the IPO. “They acquire products with real customer behavior, then integrate them into a centralized system of product, engineering, data, monetization, AI, and operating discipline.”
How Bending Spoons Started
Bending Spoons was born out of the remains of Evertale, a Copenhagen-based startup that participated in Disrupt SF 2011’s Startup Alley and raised seed funding for its photo-sharing app, Wink. Evertale failed not long after, but its founders and a couple of employees kept working together, initially on in-house apps. The team made its first acquisition soon after, followed by many others, CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari told the venture podcast 20VC.
In 2020, Bending Spoons made an exception to its policy of no longer building its own products when it created and donated Immuni, Italy’s official COVID-19 contact-tracing app. But aside from that, it has mostly honed a formula: identifying a popular product it thinks it can improve, and buying it from owners who have reached their limits.
This approach was long orthogonal to venture capital, and Bending Spoons remained bootstrapped for years. It eventually raised equity financing several times, including in 2022, 2024, and 2025. Pre-IPO, it had VIP backers including Eric Schmidt, Mike Krieger, Xavier Niel, Andre Agassi, Bradley Cooper, Maluma, The Weeknd, and The Chainsmokers.
What Happens After a Bending Spoons Acquisition?
After an acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner. It makes changes to the products’ user experience, features, underlying tech, monetization strategy, and team organization. While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: It “aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business.”
Notable Acquisitions
While Bending Spoons acquired several companies between 2014 and 2021, including the AI-powered photo enhancer Remini, its most notable acquisitions happened more recently:
- 2022: Acquired Filmic, known for its popular video- and photo-editing apps, and laid off the entire staff in December 2023.
- 2022-2023: Acquired Evernote, the note-taking app that had reportedly reached a $1 billion valuation before hitting trouble. Layoffs and cuts to the free offering followed.
- 2024: Acquired Meetup, Mosaic Group, Hopin’s StreamYard, Issuu, and WeTransfer.
- 2024: Announced a $233 million all-cash take-private deal for Brightcove.
- 2025: Acquired Komoot and Harvest; announced intentions to acquire Vimeo ($1.38 billion) and AOL (undisclosed).
- 2025-2026: Acquired Eventbrite for ~$500 million, far below its 2018 IPO valuation of $1.76 billion. The Vimeo deal closed, followed by massive layoffs.
What’s Next for Bending Spoons?
Four of Bending Spoons’ co-founders have remained at its helm: 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.
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. “Once the transformations of the three businesses are substantially complete later in 2026, we expect only a few hundred to remain.”
This headcount reduction presumably won’t affect the number of “Spooners” — core team members that have gone through its highly selective hiring 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.
Productivity has increased significantly. “In part helped by progress in AI, revenue per full-time equivalent Spooner increased from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025,” the company said. Bending Spoons also noted that “an environment of greater uncertainty could provide opportunities for us to acquire businesses at more favorable valuations.”
Despite its selective approach, Bending Spoons keeps a wide net. By its own reporting, it sourced over 2,500 acquisition opportunities in 2025, conducted in-depth analyses of approximately 200, and completed six acquisitions. Ferrari wrote in a letter that the company has “identified more than 1,000 digital businesses that could be attractive acquisition targets in the future, representing nearly $400 billion in aggregate estimated revenue in 2025.”
“As AI enables us to accomplish more with fewer people, the scalability of our acquisition and transformation model should improve as well,” Ferrari predicted.
Frequently Asked Questions
What companies has Bending Spoons acquired?
Bending Spoons has acquired numerous digital brands including AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, Meetup, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, Brightcove, Issuu, and Remini, among others.
How does Bending Spoons make money?
Bending Spoons generates revenue primarily through subscriptions and monetization of its acquired products. In 2025, it reported $1.31 billion in revenue.
What is Bending Spoons’ strategy after an acquisition?
Bending Spoons actively transforms acquired products by improving their user experience, technology, and monetization, often through price increases and workforce reductions. It aims to hold these businesses indefinitely, unlike traditional private equity firms.
Who founded Bending Spoons?
Bending Spoons was founded by Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, and Luca Querella. The company originated from the remains of a failed startup called Evertale.
