What is Bending Spoons? Everything to know about Eventbrite’s acquirer Anna Heim 8:25 AM PST · January 25, 2026 Twelve-year-old Milan-based tech conglomerate Bending Spoons has quietly become one of the tech industry’s most prolific buyers, now owning Meetup, WeTransfer and many others, but it remains largely unknown to the general public.
So what exactly is Bending Spoons? Despite its catchy name, the company has stayed remarkably under the radar, and it typically makes headlines only when it adds another recognizable brand to its portfolio — the latest in date being Eventbrite, which it agreed to buy for $500 million last December.
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 — as it did with both Evernote and WeTransfer.
Still, Bending Spoons 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 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.
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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.
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.
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