What is spoon bending? The little-known and now public owner of AOL and Vimeo

Bending Spoons, the Milan-based technology group that has made headlines for acquiring the likes of AOL and Vimeo, went public on the Nasdaq this week, briefly reaching a market cap of more than $25 billion.

While Bending Spoons stock has fallen slightly since then, its market cap is still double its previous private valuation of $11 billion, underscoring investors’ appetite for its playbook and portfolio, which includes digital brands like Meetup, Eventbrite and WeTransfer.

The Bending Spoons strategy is similar to private equity, with the difference that it holds on to the brands it acquires. Its focus is on making them more financially successful – through technology and artificial intelligence, but also often through price hikes and layoffs that have caused controversy.

Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Daniele said some of the scrutiny was due to the fact that products like Evernote were truly loved by their users. But despite all the changes, customer retention has been “remarkably stable,” he said.

The Bending Spoons user base itself has grown significantly in its 13 years of existence, and especially in the last two years. As of March 2026, its wallet served more than 500 million monthly active users and more than 9 million monthly paying customers, according to its filing.

This also flies in the face of the idea of ​​Bending Spoons acquiring dead companies, a narrative that entrepreneur Joe Herkin has been fighting since selling digital publishing platform Issuu to the Italians in 2024.

“The phrase ‘legacy online brands’ is the wrong frame,” Herkin wrote on LinkedIn after the IPO. “They get products with real customer behavior, then integrate them into a centralized system of product, engineering, data, monetization, AI, and operating discipline.” And it seems to be working: Bending Spoons reported revenues of $1.31 billion in 2025; But its market value suggests that investors expect more.

How did you start bending spoons?

The little-known backstory is that Bending Spoons was born from the remains of Evertale, a Copenhagen-based startup that participated in Disrupt SF 2011’s Startup Alley and raised seed funding for photo-sharing app Wink.

Evertale failed soon after, and investors were able to exit, but its founders and two employees continued to work together, initially on internal applications. Soon after, the team made its first acquisition, followed by several others, CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari told the Project 20VC podcast in one of his rare interviews before the company decided to go public.

In 2020, Bending Spoons broke with its policy of not building its own products when it created and donated Immuni, Italy’s official coronavirus (COVID-19) contact tracing app. But other than that, she was mostly refining a formula: identifying a popular product that she thought could be improved inside and out, and buying it from owners who had somehow reached their limits.

This approach has long been orthogonal to VC, and Bending Spoons has been in operation for years. But it eventually raised equity funding several times, including in 2022, 2024 and 2025. Before the IPO, it also had high-profile backers such as tech industry giants Eric Schmidt, Mike Krieger, and Xavier Neal; It stars Andre Agassi, Bradley Cooper, Maluma, The Weeknd, and The Chainsmokers.

What happens after the Bending Spoons acquisition?

Following the acquisition, Bending Spoons is only a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as the underlying technology; Monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including number of employees.

While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: it “aims to hold in perpetuity, and has never sold an acquired company.” It’s building a living portfolio, not presiding over a technology 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 occurred more recently.

In 2022, it acquired Filmic, known for its popular video and photo editing applications, and laid off all employees in December 2023.

In a deal also announced in 2022 and completed in early 2023, Bending Spoons also acquired Evernote, a note-taking app that reportedly reached a $1 billion valuation before running into trouble. Layoffs followed the acquisition, as well as cuts to Evernote’s free offerings.

The first half of the following year, 2024, was particularly active, as Meetup, app maker Mosaic Group, and Hopin’s StreamYard were acquired within six months.

In July 2024, it acquired publishing platform Issuu and file transfer service WeTransfer, where it later cut staff and made changes to its free plan, with stricter restrictions. In December 2025, WeTransfer co-founder Nalden criticized Bending Spoons’ decisions and said he was building another file transfer service.

In November 2024, Bending Spoons announced it would spend $233 million in a private, all-cash deal to acquire video platform Brightcove. Acquisitions continued apace in early 2025, with route planner Komoot and management software maker Harvest.

Bending Spoons also announced its intention to acquire Vimeo in a cash deal worth $1.38 billion and, shortly after, to acquire AOL from Yahoo for an undisclosed sum. (Disclosure: AOL and Yahoo are the former owners of TechCrunch, and Yahoo retains small stakes.)

In December 2025, Bending Spoons announced that it would acquire another popular brand: Eventbrite — for only about $500 million, a far cry from the company’s $1.76 billion valuation when it went public in 2018.

The Vimeo deal closed in the latter half of 2025, and was followed by mass layoffs affecting most of the workforce including the entire video team. Acquisitions of AOL, Eventbrite, and Active were also completed this year.

What’s next for spoon bending?

Four of Bending Spoons’ founders have remained at the helm of the company over the years: Matteo Daniele, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, and Luca Cirella. The IPO made them billionaires, at least on paper, while retaining control of the company, with more than 80% of voting power.

Some of their decisions will affect workers. According to the company, it has 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 companies are substantially complete later in 2026, we expect only a few hundred to remain.”

Presumably, this headcount reduction will not impact the number of “Spooners” – the term Bending Spoons reserved for certain core team members who have undergone a highly selective hiring process. There are currently about 620 of them, but that number has not grown quickly: in 2025, only 286 people will be hired out of about 800,000 job applications.

The number of core employees may not have increased much, but productivity has increased. “Thanks in part to advances in artificial intelligence, revenue per FTE Spooner increased from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, and reached $0.97 million in the first quarter of 2026,” the company said. He helped her escape a SaaS account that she now also hopes to cash in on.

“While many companies struggle to adapt, our ability to expand the profits of acquired businesses may improve,” Bend Spons noted. Additionally, “an environment of greater uncertainty could present us with opportunities to acquire businesses at more favorable valuations.”

Despite what it sees as a favorable moment, Bending Spoons has remained selective in its acquisitions, but it maintains a wide net. Through its own reports, it identified more than 2,500 acquisition opportunities in 2025, conducted in-depth analyzes of nearly 200 of them, and completed six acquisitions. More are sure to follow, that’s the rules of the game.

“We have identified more than 1,000 digital companies (private and public) that could be attractive acquisition targets in the future, representing approximately $400 billion in estimated total revenue in 2025,” Ferrari wrote in a letter on behalf of the Bending Spoons team.

The rules of the game haven’t changed, but the hint at privatization is a reminder that the company has gone from paying “$10,000 for the first acquisition” to “pursuing multibillion-dollar acquisitions.”

What follows may be more intense. “As AI enables us to do more with fewer people, the scalability of our acquisition and transformation model should improve as well,” Ferrari predicted.

This story was originally published in October 2025 and is updated periodically with new information.