What is Bending Spoons? Everything to know about AOL’s acquirer

Bending Spoons’ four cofounders this week joined the billionaire ranks.

CEO Luca Ferrari’s stake in the Milan-based tech conglomerate is now reportedly worth $1.4 billion, while cofounders 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.

The valuations come 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. It’s unclear whether any of the cofounders sold stock in the secondary transaction. Bending Spoons has declined to comment on its cofounders’ stakes.

Despite its catchy name, Bending Spoons has stayed remarkably under the radar. The 12-year-old outfit typically makes headlines only when it adds another recognizable brand to its growing portfolio — most recently this past week, when it agreed to acquire AOL. for an undisclosed amount.

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 — or both in the case of Evernote and WeTransfer.

Still, Bending Spoons itself 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 “Spooners,” its main focus is on making improvements to products and services that others have created.

However, it didn’t start that way — the 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 got an out, 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 cofounder Luca Ferrari told the 20VC podcast 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 but also to the underlying tech and most notably to outsiders, to monetization — 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 also what happened in their aftermath.

While Bending Spoons acquired several companies between 2014 and 2021, including AI 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 cquired 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 in the first half of the year.

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. Later in the year, 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 outdoors 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 even more recently, to acquire AOL from Yahoo. (Disclosure: both AOL and Yahoo are former owners of TechCrunch, in which Yahoo retains a small interest.)

According to Bending Spoons, the acquisitions of AOL and Vimeo are expected to close by the end of the year, subject to standard closing conditions and regulatory approvals, including, in the case of Vimeo, approval by its stockholders.

As of the end of October 2025, Bending Spoons is one of Europe’s rare tech decacorns (companies valued at more than $10 billion). The startup last raised at a $2.8 billion valuation in 2024, making its newest latest round a significant step up.

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.

According to Bending Spoons, its new funding will 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 as it announced its intention to acquire AOL, debt that will fund the AOL deal and future acquisitions.

Bending Spoons says 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.

AOL and Vimeo already carry far more name recognition than earlier targets, even if deal 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.