Bending Spoons Explained: Inside the Tech Company Behind AOL and Vimeo’s Public Debut

Bending Spoons, the Milan-based technology company that recently drew attention for acquiring well-known internet brands such as AOL and Vimeo, officially debuted on the Nasdaq this week. Following its public listing, the stock initially surged, briefly pushing the company’s market valuation above $25 billion.

Although Bending Spoons shares have eased slightly since the IPO, the company’s market capitalization remains more than double its last private valuation of approximately $11 billion. The strong performance reflects investor confidence in both its acquisition strategy and its portfolio of digital businesses, including Meetup, Eventbrite, and WeTransfer.

The company’s business model shares some similarities with private equity firms, but with one notable distinction: Bending Spoons acquires companies with the intention of keeping them rather than selling them later. Its strategy centres on improving the financial performance of those businesses through technology, artificial intelligence, operational efficiency, and, in many cases, price increases and workforce reductions that have generated criticism.

Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Matteo Danieli acknowledged that some of the attention surrounding these changes stems from the fact that products such as Evernote have long had devoted user communities. Despite the extensive restructuring, he said customer retention has remained “remarkably stable.”

Over its 13-year history, and especially in recent years, Bending Spoons has significantly expanded its user base. According to the company’s regulatory filing, as of March 2026, its portfolio served more than 500 million monthly active users and over 9 million monthly paying customers.

Those figures also challenge the perception that Bending Spoons focuses only on acquiring declining internet companies. Entrepreneur Joe Hyrkin, who sold digital publishing platform Issuu to the company in 2024, has publicly argued against that narrative.

“‘Old internet brands’ is the wrong frame,” Hyrkin wrote on LinkedIn following the IPO. “They acquire products with real customer behaviour, then integrate them into a centralised system of engineering, data, monetization, AI, and monetisation discipline”

The strategy appears to be delivering financial results. Bending Spoons reported revenue of $1.31 billion in 2025, while its current market valuation suggests investors expect even stronger growth in the years ahead.

How Bending Spoons began
The origins of Bending Spoons trace back to Evertale, a Copenhagen startup that participated in Startup Alley at Disrupt SF 2011 and secured seed funding for its photo-sharing application, Wink.

Evertale ultimately shut down soon afterwards, allowing investors to exit. However, the founders, along with a small number of employees, continued working as a team, initially developing their own mobile applications. Before long, they completed their first acquisition, beginning a strategy that would later define the company. CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari described this journey during one of his rare pre-IPO interviews on the venture capital podcast 20VC.

In 2020, Bending Spoons briefly departed from its acquisition-focused strategy by creating Immuni, Italy’s official COVID-19 contact-tracing application, which it developed and donated. Aside from that exception, the company has concentrated almost entirely on refining its acquisition model: identifying established digital products it believes it can improve and purchasing them from owners who have reached operational or financial limitations.

For many years, that strategy remained outside the traditional venture capital model, allowing Bending Spoons to operate as a bootstrapped business. Eventually, however, the company raised multiple rounds of equity funding, including investments in 2022, 2024, and 2025. Before its public listing, prominent supporters included Eric Schmidt, Mike Krieger, Xavier Niel, tennis legend Andre Agassi, actor Bradley Cooper, singer Maluma, The Weeknd, and The Chainsmokers.

What happens after an acquisition?
Once Bending Spoons acquires a company, it quickly begins implementing changes. These often include redesigning products, adding or removing features, modernising underlying technology, revising pricing and monetisation strategies, and restructuring organisational teams, including reducing employee headcount.

Although this emphasis on operational efficiency resembles traditional private equity, Bending Spoons says its long-term philosophy differs: it intends to retain every business it purchases. According to the company, it has never sold or acquired a business and instead aims to build a continuously evolving portfolio rather than a collection of abandoned technology brands.

Companies acquired by Bending Spoons
Between 2014 and 2021, Bending Spoons completed several acquisitions, including the AI-powered photo enhancement application Remini. However, many of its most recognizable purchases have occurred in recent years.

In 2022, the company acquired Filmic, known for its popular video and photography applications. By December 2023, Filmic’s entire workforce had been laid off.

Another transaction announced in 2022 and completed in early 2023 involved Evernote, the once-high-profile note-taking platform that reportedly reached a $1 billion valuation before encountering financial difficulties. Following the acquisition, Bending Spoons reduced staff and scaled back Evernote’s free offering.

The first half of 2024 proved especially active, with acquisitions including Meetup, application developer Mosaic Group, and StreamYard, the streaming platform originally developed by Hopin.

In July 2024, Bending Spoons also purchased publishing platform Issuu and file-sharing service WeTransfer. Following the acquisition, the company reduced staffing levels and revised WeTransfer’s free service by introducing tighter usage limits. In December 2025, WeTransfer co-founder Nalden publicly criticized those decisions and announced he was building a new file-sharing platform.

Later, in November 2024, Bending Spoons announced a $233 million all-cash agreement to take Brightcove private. The acquisition pace continued into early 2025, with purchases including the route-planning platform Komoot and the project management software company Harvest.

The company also revealed plans to acquire Vimeo in a $1.38 billion all-cash transaction before announcing an agreement to purchase AOL from Yahoo for an undisclosed price.

In December 2025, Bending Spoons unveiled another major acquisition by agreeing to purchase Eventbrite for roughly $500 million—a fraction of thecompany’ss $1.76 billion valuation at the time of its 2018 public offering.

The Vimeo acquisition closed during the second half of 2025 and was followed by widespread layoffs affecting much of the workforce, including the entire video team. The acquisitions of AOL, Eventbrite, and Tractive have also since been completed.

What’s next for Bending Spoons?
Four of the company’s founders—Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, and Luca Querella—continue to lead Bending Spoons today. The Nasdaq listing made each of them paper billionaires while allowing the founding team to retain more than 80% of the company’s voting power.

Some of the company’s future decisions will continue to affect employees. According to Bending Spoons, acquisitions involving AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo added approximately 1,830 full-time equivalent employees. However, many of those workers have already left the company, and additional reductions are expected. Bending Spoons has stated that once integration work is substantially completed later in 2026, only a few hundred employees from those businesses are expected to remain.

Those reductions are unlikely to affect the company’s core internal workforce, known as “Spooners.” These employees are selected through an exceptionally competitive hiring process. Bending Spoons currently employs around 620 Spooners, and hiring remains highly selective. During 2025, the company hired only 286 people despite receiving approximately 800,000 job applications.

Although core staffing has remained relatively stable, productivity has increased significantly. The company said that, helped in part by advances in AI, revenue per full-time equivalent Spooner rose from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, and reached $0.97 million in the first quarter of 2026.

Bending Spoons believes these efficiency gains position it well as many software companies continue adjusting to industry-wide changes. According to the company, as other businesses struggle to adapt, opportunities to improve the earnings of acquired companies may become even greater. It also believes that a more uncertain economic environment could create additional opportunities to acquire businesses at more attractive valuations.

Despite viewing the market as favourable, Bending Spoons has remained selective. During 2025 alone, the company evaluated more than 2,500 acquisition opportunities, conducted detailed reviews of approximately 200 businesses, and ultimately completed six acquisitions. Based on its historical approach, more deals are likely to follow.

In a letter written on behalf of the company, Ferrari said Bending Spoons has already identified more than 1,000 private and public digital businesses that could become attractive acquisition targets in the future, representing nearly $400 billion in combined estimated revenue during 2025.

While the company’s overall strategy has remained consistent, its scale has changed dramatically. Ferrari noted that Bending Spoons has progressed from paying roughly “$10,000 for our first acquisition” to pursuing transactions worth billions of dollars.

Looking ahead, Ferrari believes artificial intelligence will make the model even more scalable. “As AI enables us to accomplish more with fewer people, the scalability of our acquisition and transformation model should improve as well,” he said.