The Bending Spoons playbook

How it all started

It all started when three newly graduated engineers — Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli and Francesco Patarnello — launched Evertale, a digital-diary app, in 2010. It flopped. Down to their last $40,000, they tried again: in 2013, joined by a fourth co-founder, Luca Querella, they set up Bending Spoons — the name a nod to the spoon-bending scene in The Matrix.

The failure became the philosophy. Rather than gamble on inventing the next hit, Bending Spoons buys software people already use and runs it better — a Milan-built hybrid of private-equity firm and product studio. It cuts costs aggressively (sometimes keeping little beyond the technology itself), pools engineering, R&D and marketing across the portfolio, rotates its "Spooners" from one app to another, and targets a ~25% annualised return on capital. Today the group spans roughly 50 companies, around ten of which generate ~80% of revenue.

For Italy — which counts 13 verified unicorns and $1bn exits on Dealroom, against 86 in Germany and 52 in France — the Nasdaq debut was more than an exit. It minted the country's most valuable tech company, backed by names from Baillie Gifford to Eric Schmidt. What follows is the machine behind it: what Bending Spoons has bought, what it paid, and where the revenue now comes from.

The roll-up is overwhelmingly American and overwhelmingly consumer: video and creator tools (Vimeo, AOL, Brightcove, Issuu), the events stack (Eventbrite, Meetup, Hopin and its StreamYard arm), and the productivity classics (Evernote, WeTransfer). These are household names with millions of users — and growth that long ago flatlined.

That is the whole point. Bending Spoons doesn't pay for growth. It pays for an installed base it can run more efficiently than the previous owner — which means it pays remarkably little.

So how does buying no-growth actually make money?

Paying one-to-three times revenue for a flat business only pays off if you can change the business. Bending Spoons' answer isn't to chase the top line — it's to rebuild the company underneath it: strip the org back to a small, senior team, rewrite the product and the way it charges, and let a far leaner cost base do the rest. The prospectus it filed to go public is the first time the results of that surgery are on the record.

Part of the answer, though, is sitting right in the chart above: multiple arbitrage. A dollar of revenue bought at 1–3× is repriced at the ~12× Bending Spoons itself commands on Nasdaq the moment it moves inside — value created at the stroke of a pen, before the first restructuring. The twist, as Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll points out, is that the same trade in B2B software is imploding — Constellation Software has sunk to ~3× revenue as the market questions whether pre-AI enterprise revenue has a terminal value at all — so the premium on Bending Spoons is, in effect, a bet that beloved consumer apps age better than enterprise licences.

Take Evernote, the note-taking app it bought in 2023 after years of decline. Bending Spoons cut the team from 341 people to 60 and collapsed four management layers into two. Then, instead of shrinking, the business turned: new-user registrations went from falling ~20% a year to growing 29%, and revenue per user grew 2.5×. The same shape repeats across the portfolio — Remini, the photo-enhancement app, now earns more than 9× the revenue it did before acquisition on five times the users; StreamYard runs on 44 people instead of 154, yet paid marketing now pulls in 142% more sign-ups for 11% less spend.

Watch what happened to output, though — this is the part the cost-cutting frame misses. An 82% smaller Evernote team didn't ship less: product releases grew ~50% in 2023 and doubled in 2024, an order-of-magnitude jump in output per person. It's a pattern investors have started calling out — Bessemer's Talia Goldberg points to Evernote as proof that consumer and prosumer software carries enormous hidden bloat, and that a small, senior team with nothing in its way ships faster than the big organisation it replaced. That shipping velocity — not marketing spend — is what restarted user growth, and it's how a margin story quietly becomes a top-line acceleration story.

Aggregate it and you get a machine that looks nothing like the sleepy apps feeding it. Group revenue climbed from $387m in 2023 to $1.31bn in 2025 — an 84% annual growth rate — even though the underlying businesses grow only ~7–13% on their own. The rest is the playbook repeating: buy, fix, repeat. And it throws off more cash the bigger it gets: adjusted operating margin has widened from 36% to 51%, across a portfolio now serving 500m+ monthly users and 9m+ paying customers.

One caveat: the spree is debt-funded — borrowings have reached ~$4.4bn — and heavy acquisition accounting keeps reported net income near zero, so the profit shows up in cash flow and adjusted figures before it reaches the GAAP bottom line. Investors bought the model anyway. Bending Spoons priced its IPO above range at an $18.4bn valuation — up from $11bn just months earlier and $2.6bn two years before that — and still closed day one up ~40%, near $26bn. Its pre-IPO backers ranged from Baillie Gifford and Fidelity to Ryan Reynolds, while the five founders keep voting control. The market's read on the playbook: it works, and there are plenty more apps to run it on.

So what does a Bending Spoons target look like? The pattern is unmistakable: a famous brand, a flat-to-shrinking top line, a bloated headcount the new owner can cut, and — crucially — a share price that has fallen far enough to put the whole company on sale for under ~5× revenue.

Screen the public markets for that profile and a shortlist falls out. Zoom is the obvious archetype — a verb-as-a-brand trading near 4× revenue with 7,400 staff — even if, at ~$20bn, it is still too big for Bending Spoons to swallow today. Plenty of others are squarely within reach — and with public stock and fresh IPO cash to pay with, the hunt only accelerates.

And the richest hunting ground may not even be public. Some of the best-fitting brands already sit in private-equity portfolios whose owners want an exit: Yahoo — held by Apollo, which already sold Bending Spoons the AOL half — plus Ancestry (Blackstone, now running a sale process) and Squarespace (taken private by Permira in 2024). Others get bought before Bending Spoons can move: Udemy, a textbook fit, was swallowed by Coursera in May. The map below is the public slice — the part of the hunt that happens in daylight.