Bending Spoons

Some companies grow organically. Some grow through acquisition. Bending Spoons does both with an intensity that has few precedents in European technology history. Founded in 2013 by Luca Ferrari and four co-founders — Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella, and Tomasz Greber — initially in Copenhagen and later relocated to Milan, the company spent a decade building an acquisition and optimization machine that is now targeting a $20 billion IPO on US markets. The playbook is precise and repeatable: Bending Spoons identifies software products with established user bases but compressed margins or suboptimal management, acquires them, restructures aggressively — often with significant workforce reductions — and relaunches them with intensive A/B testing cycles and subscription-based monetization strategies. It is not a sentimental approach, but it works. Apps across the portfolio have been downloaded over 400 million times, and include Splice for mobile video editing, Remini for AI-powered photo enhancement, and StreamYard for professional live streaming. The major acquisitions of recent years illustrate the breadth of ambition. In 2022 Bending Spoons acquired Evernote, the note-taking app with 220 million registered users that had lost its competitive edge. In 2023 came WeTransfer, the Dutch file-sharing platform with 87 million monthly users. In 2024 they picked up Mosaic, a resource management tool for creative agencies. In September 2025, a deal to acquire Vimeo for $1.38 billion in cash. And then, in October 2025, the boldest move yet: buying AOL from Yahoo for approximately $1.5 billion, financed through a $2.8 billion debt raise. The financial numbers reflect this pace of expansion. Company valuation climbed from €2.55 billion in 2024 to $11 billion by end of 2025. Expected 2025 revenues are approximately $1 billion, with adjusted EBITDA projected at $700 million — a margin profile that explains why investors are pricing the company at market-leader multiples. Projections for 2026 point to adjusted EBITDA of $1.4 billion. What makes Bending Spoons genuinely unusual, though, is not just the financial trajectory — it is the organizational model. With roughly 400 to 500 total employees, the company manages a portfolio of products serving hundreds of millions of global users. The ratio between headcount and output is deliberately extreme: every position is filled only with the best available talent, through a selection process so rigorous that in 2025 alone the company received over 600,000 applications with a job offer rate of 0.04%. It is a model that prioritizes intellectual density over traditional organizational scale. Now, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, BNP Paribas, Allen & Co., and Jefferies mandated to organize a potential Wall Street listing targeting a $20 billion valuation, Bending Spoons is positioning itself to become the largest Italian tech company ever listed on US markets. A journey that began with a small team in Copenhagen building quality mobile apps, and has resulted, twelve years later, in redefining what a European technology company can aspire to build.