Bending Spoons, the Milan-based tech conglomerate that made headlines for acquiring companies like AOL and Vimeo, went public on the Nasdaq this week with a bang, briefly reaching a market capitalization of more than $25 billion.

While Bending Spoons’ shares have fallen slightly since then, its market capitalization remains double its previous private valuation of $11 billion, confirming investor appetite for its manual and its portfolio, which includes digital brands such as Meetup, Eventbrite and WeTransfer.

Bending Spoons’ strategy shares similarities with that of private equity, with the difference that it retains the brands it acquires. Their goal is to make them more financially successful, with technology and artificial intelligence, but also often through price increases and layoffs that have caused controversy.

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

Bending Spoons’ user base has grown significantly in its 13 years of existence, and particularly in recent years. As of March 2026, its portfolio served more than 500 million monthly active users and more than 9 million paying monthly customers, according to its filing.

This also goes against the idea that Bending Spoons acquires 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 frame,” Hyrkin wrote on LinkedIn after the IPO. “They acquire products with real customer behavior and then integrate them into a centralized system of product, engineering, data, monetization, artificial intelligence and operational discipline.” This seems to be working: Bending Spoons reported revenue of $1.31 billion in 2025; but its market capitalization indicates that investors anticipate even more.

How did Bending Spoons start?

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 its photo-sharing app, Wink.

Evertale failed soon after and investors were able to exit, but its founders and a couple of 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 20VC venture podcast in one of his rare interviews before the company decided to go public.

In 2020, Bending Spoons made an exception to its policy of stopping manufacturing its own products when it created and donated Immuni, the official Italian COVID-19 contact tracing app. But other than that, he’s mainly been perfecting a formula: identifying a popular product that he thinks he can improve inside and out, and buying it from owners who have reached their limits in some way.

This approach was long orthogonal to VC, and Bending Spoons continued to operate for years. But it eventually raised equity financing several times, including in 2022, 2024 and 2025. Before the IPO, it also had VIP backers such as tech industry greats Eric Schmidt, Mike Krieger and Xavier Niel; and stars Andre Agassi, Bradley Cooper, Maluma, The Weeknd and The Chainsmokers.

What happens after the Bending Spoons acquisition?

Post-acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but 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 staff.

While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: it “aims to be around forever and has never sold an acquired business.” It’s about building an active portfolio, not presiding over a technology graveyard.

What companies has Bending Spoons acquired?

While Bending Spoons acquired several companies between 2014 and 2021, including the AI-powered photo enhancer Remini, its most notable acquisitions came more recently.

In 2022, it acquired Filmic, known for its popular photo and video editing apps, and laid off all 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 running into trouble. The acquisition saw layoffs, as well as cuts to Evernote’s free offering.

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

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

In November 2024, Bending Spoons announced it would spend $233 million in a private 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 an all-cash deal worth $1.38 billion and, shortly after, acquire AOL from Yahoo for an undisclosed amount. (Disclosure: Both AOL and Yahoo are former owners of TechCrunch, with Yahoo retaining a small stake.)

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

The deal with Vimeo closed in the second half of 2025 and was followed by mass layoffs that affected most of the workforce, including the entire video team. The acquisitions of AOL, Eventbrite and Tractive were also completed this year.

What’s next for spoon bending?

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

Some of your decisions will affect workers. According to the company, it added “1,830 full-time equivalent team members through the acquisitions of AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo,” but it has already “parted ways” with many and will continue. “Once the transformations of all three businesses are substantially completed by the end of 2026, we expect only a few hundred to remain.”

Presumably this staff reduction will not affect the number of “Spooners,” the term Bending Spoons reserves for some core team members who have gone through its highly selective hiring process. Currently there are about 620, but that number has not grown rapidly: in 2025, it only made 286 hires out of about 800,000 job applications.

The core workforce may not have increased much, but productivity has. “Partly helped by progress in AI, Spooner’s full-time equivalent revenue 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 him escape the SaaS from which he now also hopes to benefit.

“As many companies struggle to adapt, our ability to expand an acquired company’s earnings may improve,” Bending Spoons noted. Additionally, “an environment of greater uncertainty could provide us with opportunities to acquire businesses at more favorable valuations.”

Despite what it sees as favorable timing, Bending Spoons has remained selective in its acquisitions but casts a wide net. According to its own reports, it pursued more than 2,500 acquisition opportunities in 2025, performed in-depth analysis on approximately 200 of them, and completed six acquisitions. More will surely follow: that’s the manual.

“We have identified more than 1,000 digital companies (both private and public) that could be attractive acquisition targets in the future, representing almost $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 privatization suggestion 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 allows us to achieve more with fewer people, the scalability of our acquisition and transformation model should also improve,” Ferrari predicted.

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