Inside Bending Spoons: The Secretive AOL & Vimeo Owner Goes Public

Milan-based tech conglomerate Bending Spoons, the secretive owner of iconic internet brands including AOL and Vimeo, made its public debut on the Nasdaq this week. The stock popped shortly after listing, briefly pushing the company’s market capitalization above $25 billion.

Though shares have eased slightly since the initial surge, the company’s market cap still sits at roughly double its previous private valuation of $11 billion. That premium reflects strong investor confidence in Bending Spoons’ distinctive acquisition and transformation playbook, which has assembled a portfolio of digital stalwarts such as Meetup, Eventbrite, and WeTransfer.

Bending Spoons operates with a strategy that echoes private equity, but with one critical twist: it never sells the brands it buys. Instead, it aims to hold them indefinitely, focusing on boosting their financial performance through technology, artificial intelligence, and often controversial tactics like price increases and layoffs.

Speaking with TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli acknowledged that some of the backlash stems from the fact that products like Evernote were genuinely beloved by users. Still, he emphasized that customer retention has remained “remarkably stable” despite the changes.

Bending Spoons’ own user base has swelled dramatically, particularly over the last two years. According to its regulatory filing, as of March 2026, the company’s portfolio served over 500 million monthly active users and more than 9 million monthly paying customers.

This growth challenges the narrative that Bending Spoons simply buys dying companies. Joe Hyrkin, who sold digital publishing platform Issuu to the company in 2024, has been pushing back against that characterization since the IPO.

“’Old internet brands’ is the wrong frame,” Hyrkin wrote on LinkedIn. “They acquire products with real customer behavior, then integrate them into a centralized system of product, engineering, data, monetization, AI, and operating discipline.” The numbers back him up: Bending Spoons reported $1.31 billion in revenue for 2025, and its market cap suggests investors expect even more.

How Bending Spoons began

The company’s origins are little known. Bending Spoons emerged from the ashes of Evertale, a Copenhagen-based startup that participated in Disrupt SF 2011’s Startup Alley. Evertale had raised seed funding for Wink, a photo-sharing app, but failed shortly thereafter. While investors were able to exit, the founders and a few employees stayed together, initially building in-house apps.

CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari shared the story on the venture podcast 20VC, one of his rare pre-IPO interviews. The team soon made its first acquisition, and many followed. In 2020, Bending Spoons broke its own rule of no longer building original products to create Immuni, Italy’s official COVID-19 contact-tracing app, which it donated to the government.

Otherwise, the company has refined a consistent formula: identify a popular product it believes it can improve, then buy it from owners who have hit a ceiling. This approach long ran counter to venture capital norms, and Bending Spoons remained bootstrapped for years. It eventually raised equity financing in 2022, 2024, and 2025. Pre-IPO backers included tech heavyweights Eric Schmidt, Mike Krieger, and Xavier Niel, as well as celebrities Andre Agassi, Bradley Cooper, Maluma, The Weeknd, and The Chainsmokers.

Life after acquisition

Bending Spoons is far from a passive owner. After acquiring a company, it overhauls the user experience, features, underlying technology, monetization strategy, pricing, team structure, and headcount. While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity, Bending Spoons insists on a key difference: it “aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business.” The company is building a live portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard.

A timeline of acquisitions

Bending Spoons made several acquisitions between 2014 and 2021, including the AI-powered photo enhancer Remini, but its most notable purchases came later.

In 2022, it acquired Filmic, known for its popular video and photo editing apps, and laid off the entire staff in December 2023. That same year, it announced a deal to buy Evernote, the note-taking app once valued at $1 billion. Layoffs and cuts to the free tier followed.

The first half of 2024 was especially active. Within six months, Bending Spoons acquired Meetup, app maker Mosaic Group, and StreamYard from Hopin. In July 2024, it added Issuu and WeTransfer, later cutting staff and tightening free plan limits. In December 2025, WeTransfer cofounder Nalden publicly criticized the decisions and said he was building a competing file transfer service.

In November 2024, Bending Spoons announced a $233 million all-cash take-private deal for video platform Brightcove. Early 2025 brought acquisitions of route planner Komoot and management software maker Harvest. Then came the blockbusters: a $1.38 billion all-cash deal for Vimeo and an undisclosed amount to buy AOL from Yahoo. (Disclosure: Both AOL and Yahoo are former owners of TechCrunch, and Yahoo retains a small interest.)

In December 2025, Bending Spoons announced it would acquire Eventbrite for roughly $500 million, a steep discount from the company’s $1.76 billion valuation at its 2018 IPO. The Vimeo deal closed in the latter half of 2025, followed by massive layoffs affecting most of the workforce, including the entire video team. The acquisitions of AOL, Eventbrite, and Tractive were completed this year.

What comes next

Four co-founders have remained at the helm: Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, and Luca Querella. The IPO made them billionaires on paper, while they retain over 80% of voting power. Their decisions will continue to affect workers. 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.”

Those cuts likely won’t affect the number of “Spooners,” the term for core team members who have passed Bending Spoons’ highly selective hiring process. There are currently about 620 Spooners, and the number hasn’t grown quickly: in 2025, it made just 286 hires from roughly 800,000 job applications.

Core headcount may be flat, but productivity has soared. “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, and was $0.97 million in Q1 2026,” the company said. That efficiency helped Bending Spoons escape the broader SaaS reckoning, and it now hopes to benefit from it.

“As many businesses struggle to adapt, our ability to expand the earnings of an acquired business may improve,” Bending Spoons noted. It added that “an environment of greater uncertainty could provide opportunities for us to acquire businesses at more favorable valuations.”

Despite its appetite, Bending Spoons remains selective. In 2025, it sourced over 2,500 acquisition opportunities, conducted deep analyses of roughly 200, and completed six deals. More will follow. “We’ve identified more than 1,000 digital businesses (both private and public) that could be attractive acquisition targets in the future, representing nearly $400 billion in aggregate estimated revenue in 2025,” Ferrari wrote in a letter.

The playbook hasn’t changed, but the scale has. Bending Spoons has gone from paying “$10,000 for our first acquisition” to now “pursuing acquisitions in the billions of dollars.” What comes next may be even more intense. “As AI enables us to accomplish more with fewer people, the scalability of our acquisition and transformation model should improve as well,” Ferrari predicted.