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Bending Spoons, a 12-year-old Milan-based tech conglomerate, is a prolific acquirer of underperforming but popular tech brands like Meetup, WeTransfer, and most recently, Eventbrite. The company focuses on transforming these acquired assets to improve efficiency, often through restructuring and layoffs.
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總部位於米蘭、成立十二年的科技集團 Bending Spoons，是科技產業中活躍的收購者，專門收購表現不佳但受歡迎的科技品牌，如 Meetup、WeTransfer，以及最近的 Eventbrite。該公司著重於改造這些收購來的資產以提升效率，常透過重組和裁員來達成。
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Twelve-year-old Milan-based tech conglomerate Bending Spoons has quietly become one of the tech industry’s most prolific buyers, now owning Meetup, WeTransfer and many others, but it remains largely unknown to the general public.
So what exactly is Bending Spoons? Despite its catchy name, the company has stayed remarkably under the radar, and it typically makes headlines only when it adds another recognizable brand to its portfolio — the latest in date being Eventbrite, which it agreed to buy for $500 million last December.
But Bending Spoons isn’t a traditional private equity firm or a pure financial investment vehicle. Its focus is on acquiring underperforming but popular tech brands, then transforming them to serve millions of users more efficiently.
The company tends to make news when it restructures these acquired companies, often through significant layoffs, or makes controversial changes to beloved products — as it did with both Evernote and WeTransfer.
Still, Bending Spoons remains largely unknown, even though its roster of products has served more than a billion people, with over 300 million monthly active users and 10 million paying customers. Here’s what you need to know about the company reshaping some of the internet’s most recognizable brands.
Bending Spoons describes itself as a company that acquires and transforms digital businesses. Having grown to a headcount of 400 to 500 employees (whom the company calls “Spooners”), its main focus is on making improvements to products and services that others have created.
However, it didn’t start that way — Bending Spoons’ founders had taken a stab at building their own apps and products before eventually shifting their focus.
The little-known backstory is that 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, and investors were able to exit, but its founders and a couple of employees kept working together, initially on in-house apps. Soon enough, the team made its first acquisition, followed by many others, CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari told the venture podcast 20VC in a rare interview.
In 2020, Bending Spoons made an exception when it created and donated Immuni, Italy’s official COVID-19 contact-tracing app. But other than that, it has mostly been honing a formula: Bending Spoons identifies a popular product it thinks it can improve inside and out, and buys it from owners who have reached their limits.
After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech; monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount.
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.” It is building a live portfolio, not collecting internet relics or presiding over a tech graveyard.
To be clear, Bending Spoons’ acquisition targets so far haven’t necessarily been failing businesses — many still had substantial user bases and revenue. But they’ve tended to be stagnant, neglected, or had owners looking to exit. Let’s recap these key deals, and what happened in their aftermath.
While Bending Spoons acquired several companies between 2014 and 2021, including the AI-powered photo enhancer Remini, its most notable acquisitions happened more recently.
In 2022, it acquired Filmic, known for its popular video- and photo-editing apps, and laid off the entire staff in December 2023.
In a deal also announced in 2022 and finalized in early 2023, Bending Spoons also acquired Evernote, the note-taking app that had reportedly reached a $1 billion valuation before hitting trouble. Layoffs followed the acquisition, as well as cuts to Evernote’s free offering.
The first half of following year, 2024, was particularly active, with the acquisition of Meetup, app maker Mosaic Group, and Hopin’s StreamYard all happening within six months.
In July 2024, it went on to acquire the publishing platform Issuu and the file transfer service WeTransfer, where it later cut staff and made changes to its free plan, introducing stricter limits. In December 2025, WeTransfer’s cofounder 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 on an all-cash take-private deal to acquire video platform Brightcove.
The acquisitions have continued apace in 2025, with acquisitions that include the route planner Komoot and management software maker Harvest.
Bending Spoons also announced its intention to acquire Vimeo in a $1.38 billion all-cash deal, and soon after, to acquire AOL from Yahoo for an undisclosed amount. (Disclosure: Both AOL and Yahoo are former owners of TechCrunch, in which Yahoo retains a small interest.)
At the time, Bending Spoons said the acquisitions of AOL and Vimeo were expected to close by the end of 2025, subject to standard closing conditions and regulatory approvals; including, in the case of Vimeo, approval by its stockholders, which they have recently granted.
Layoffs also followed the completion of Vimeo’s acquisition. The information was confirmed to Business Insider by Bending Spoons, which declined to say how many people would lose their jobs.
In December 2025, Bending Spoons announced it would acquire yet another well-known brand: Eventbrite. Once again, it may pay much less than Eventbrite was once worth — only some $500 million, a far cry from the company’s $1.76 billion valuation when it went public in 2018.
However, there might be more hurdles. Earlier this month, Eventbrite stockholders filed a lawsuit in Delaware to upend the take-private deal over voting rights, and Eventbrite is currently fighting an effort to fast-track this challenge.
Since October 2025, Bending Spoons has been one of Europe’s rare tech decacorns (companies valued at more than $10 billion).
This comes on the heels of Bending Spoons’ latest funding round: $270 million from investors, including T. Rowe Price and earlier backers Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, Durable Capital Partners, and Fidelity, plus a $440 million secondary share sale by existing shareholders.
The company last raised at a $2.8 billion valuation in 2024, making its updated $11 billion valuation a significant step up — also for its four co-founders, who joined the billionaire ranks as a result.
Ferrari’s stake in Bending Spoons is now reportedly worth $1.4 billion, while co-founders Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella, and Francesco Patarnello each hold stakes worth $1.3 billion, according to Forbes estimates based on shareholder data published by the Italian Business Register.
It’s unclear whether any of the co-founders sold stock in the secondary transaction. Bending Spoons has declined to comment on its co-founders’ stakes.
Though long bootstrapped, Bending Spoons had previously raised equity financing several times, including in September 2022 and early 2024. It also has VIPs on its cap table, including tennis and entertainment stars Andre Agassi and Bradley Cooper; tech industry bigs Eric Schmidt, Mike Krieger, and Xavier Niel; and performers The Weeknd, The Chainsmokers, and Maluma.
Upon announcing its new funding in October 2025, Bending Spoons said it would support future acquisitions and investment in its proprietary technology and AI capabilities. This comes in addition to the $2.8 billion in debt financing the company disclosed when it announced its intention to acquire AOL, debt that will fund the AOL deal and future acquisitions.
Bending Spoons said it intends to continue pursuing new acquisitions that expand its portfolio of consumer and enterprise digital products, and it now has funding to afford more prominent targets going forward — as confirmed by its decision to acquire Eventbrite.
AOL and Vimeo already carry far more name recognition than earlier targets, though the AOL terms remain undisclosed. The properties also have some reach. In announcing the AOL deal, Bending Spoons claimed that AOL remains one of the top 10 most-used email providers in the world, with 8 million daily active users and 30 million monthly active users. (Not long before acquiring AOL, Bending Spoons was also rumored to be eyeing app maker Elysium and Typeform, the Barcelona-based SaaS company known for its form creation tools.)
Presumably to support its continued efforts to acquire companies, it also has openings across various roles, with new hires initially working from its Milan headquarters before gaining the option to work from offices in London, Madrid, and Warsaw, or remotely.
In fact, despite warning candidates that Bending Spoons is a “demanding environment,” the company has said it already received more than 600,000 job applications in 2025, a figure that will likely climb as its recent deals generate additional attention.
Candidates aside, Bending Spoons is also interviewing banks. According to reports, the company is holding talks with several financial entities to launch an IPO on the NYSE. In November, Ferrari had told Reuters that should it decide to go public, Bending Spoons would probably list in the U.S., where tech companies tend to achieve higher valuations.
This story was originally published in October 2025 and is updated periodically with new information.
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Anna Heim is a writer and editorial consultant.
You can contact or verify outreach from Anna by emailing annatechcrunch [at] gmail.com.
As a freelance reporter at TechCrunch since 2021, she has covered a large range of startup-related topics including AI, fintech & insurtech, SaaS & pricing, and global venture capital trends.
As of May 2025, her reporting for TechCrunch focuses on Europe’s most interesting startup stories.
Anna has moderated panels and conducted onstage interviews at industry events of all sizes, including major tech conferences such as TechCrunch Disrupt, 4YFN, South Summit, TNW Conference, VivaTech, and many more.
A former LATAM & Media Editor at The Next Web, startup founder and Sciences Po Paris alum, she’s fluent in multiple languages, including French, English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.
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