What is Bending Spoons? The little-known firm behind Vimeo’s sweeping layoffs

Vimeo was hit by a massive round of layoffs this past week, according to a report by Business Insider. Staffers posting on various social media sites that the layoffs impacted most of the company, including the entire video team. Vimeo is a video-hosting platform, so that sounds bad.

The layoffs are the latest restructuring by Bending Spoons, the Milan-based tech conglomerate that acquired Vimeo for $1.38 billion in an all-cash deal that closed in the latter half of 2025. While Bending Spoons may be unknown to many, it’s quietly become one of the tech industry’s most prolific buyers, now owning Meetup, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and many others.

So what exactly is Bending Spoons? Despite its catchy name, the 12-year-old company has stayed remarkably under the radar, typically making headlines only when it adds another recognizable brand to its portfolio — or when it restructures these companies through significant layoffs.

The company’s playbook has become clear: acquire underperforming but popular tech brands, then transform them to serve millions of users more efficiently through controversial changes to beloved products and substantial workforce reductions. It followed this pattern with Evernote and WeTransfer, and is now repeating it with Vimeo.

Despite remaining largely unknown to the public, Bending Spoons’ 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.

What is Bending Spoons?

Despite often being described as a private equity firm, Bending Spoons describes itself more specifically 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.

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 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. 

The Vimeo acquisition closed in the latter half of 2025, and was followed by the massive layoffs that hit the company this month, impacting most of the workforce including the entire video team.

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.

How much is Bending Spoons worth?

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.

What’s next?

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.