Technology conglomerate based in Milan Bending spoons this week acquired Eventbrite for $500 million, adding the event ticketing platform to its growing portfolio of recognizable consumer technology brands.
The deal, announced Tuesday, marks the latest acquisition for a 12-year-old company that has quietly grow to be one of the tech industry’s most prolific acquirers – regardless that it has remained largely unknown to the general public.
What exactly is Spoon Bending? Despite its catchy name, the company remained in the shadows and typically made headlines only when it added one other recognizable brand to its portfolio – which now includes Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup and Streamyard, among others.
However, Bending Spoons is not a traditional private equity firm or a purely financial investment vehicle. It focuses on acquiring unprofitable but popular technology brands and then transforming them to serve thousands and thousands of users more effectively.
An organization often makes news when it restructures acquired corporations, often through significant layoffs, or makes controversial changes to beloved products – as was the case with Evernote and WeTransfer.
Yet Bending Spoons itself stays largely unknown, regardless that its product offering has served over a billion people, with over 300 million monthly lively users and 10 million paying customers. Here’s what you need to know about the company that is transforming some of the most recognizable brands on the web.
What is spoon bending?
Bending Spoons describes itself as a company that acquires and transforms digital businesses. With 400 to 500 employees (whom the company calls “Spooners”), its most important focus is on improving products and services created by others.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
But it didn’t start out that way – the founders of Bending Spoons began building their very own apps and products before eventually changing course.
The little-known story is that Bending Spoons was born from the stays of Evertale, a Copenhagen startup that attended Startup Alley Disrupt SF 2011 and raised seed funding for its photo-sharing app Wink.
Soon after, Evertale went bankrupt and investors were allowed to leave the company, but its founders and a few employees continued to collaborate, initially on their very own applications. The team soon made its first acquisition, and many others followed, CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari said on the 20VC enterprise podcast in a rare interview.
In 2020, Bending Spoons made an exception by creating and donating Immuni, Italy’s official COVID-19 contact tracing app. But beyond that, he was mainly refining the formula: Bending Spoons identifies a popular product that it thinks it may improve inside and out, and buys it from owners who have already hit their limit.
Following the acquisition, Bending Spoons is now not a passive owner, making changes to the product experience and features, but also to the underlying technology; monetization strategy, including pricing; and organization of the team, including the variety of staff.
While its focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons says it has a key difference: “it aims to hold the company forever and has never sold the acquired company.” He’s building a live portfolio, not collecting web relics or presiding over a tech graveyard.
To be clear, Bending Spoons’ acquisition targets so far have not necessarily been failing corporations – many of them still had significant user bases and significant revenues. However, they sometimes stagnated, were neglected or the owners wanted to leave. Let’s recap these key trades and what happened after them.
What corporations has Bending Spoons acquired?
While Bending Spoons acquired several corporations between 2014 and 2021, including Remini, an AI-powered photo enhancer, the most vital acquisitions were newer.
In 2022, it acquired Filmic, known for its popular video and photo editing applications, and in December 2023, it laid off its entire staff.
In a deal also announced in 2022 and finalized in early 2023, Bending Spoons also acquired Evernote, a note-taking app that was reportedly valued at $1 billion before it ran into trouble. The acquisition was followed by layoffs, in addition to cuts to Evernote’s free offering.
The first half of the next yr 2024 was particularly lively, when, among others, Meetup takeoverapplication creator Mosaics GroupAND Hopin’s StreamYard every part happens inside six months.
In July 2024, it acquired a publishing platform Issue and file transfer service WeTransfer, which later laid off staff and made changes to its free plan to introduce tighter limits. Later that yr, Bending Spoons announced it might spend $233 million in a private take-cash deal to acquire video platform Brightcove.
The pace of acquisitions will proceed in 2025, with acquisitions including: Komoot route planning and management software developer Set.
Bending Spoons also announced its intention to acquire Vimeo in an all-cash deal valued at $1.38 billion, and shortly thereafter to acquire AOL from Yahoo for an undisclosed amount. (Disclosure: Both AOL and Yahoo are former owners of TechCrunch, in which Yahoo has a small stake.)
According to Bending Spoons, the acquisitions of AOL and Vimeo are expected to close by the end of the yr, subject to standard closing conditions and regulatory approvals, including, in the case of Vimeo, shareholder approval.
Meanwhile, Bending Spoons acquired one other well-known brand: Eventbrite. Once again, it’ll pay significantly lower than Eventbrite was once price – only about $500 million, a far cry from what the company $1.76 billion valuation at the time of listing on the stock exchange in 2018.
How much are bending spoons price?
As of October 2025, Bending Spoons is one of the few European tech decacorns (corporations valued at over $10 billion).
This comes on the heels of Bending Spoons’ latest round of financing: $270 million from investors including T. Rowe Price and prior backers Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, Durable Capital Partners and Fidelity, in addition to a $440 million secondary stock sale by existing shareholders.
The company last acquired a valuation of $2.8 billion in 2024, which implies that the updated valuation of $11 billion is a significant step up – also for its 4 co-founders, who have joined the ranks of billionaires as a result.
According to Forbes estimates based on shareholder data published by the Italian Business Register, CEO Luca Ferrari’s stake in Bending Spoons is now price $1.4 billion, and co-founders Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella and Francesco Patarnello hold shares price $1.3 billion.
It is unclear whether any of the co-founders sold shares in the second transaction. Bending Spoons declined to comment on its co-founders’ rates.
Although Bending Spoons has been operating for a very long time, it had previously obtained equity financing several timesincluding in September 2022 and early 2024. It also has VIPs on its roster, including tennis and entertainment stars Andre Agassi and Bradley Cooper; technology industry greats Eric Schmidt, Mike Krieger and Xavier Niel; and performers The Weeknd, The Chainsmokers and Maluma.
In announcing the latest financing in October 2025, Bending Spoons said it might support future acquisitions and investments in its proprietary technology and artificial intelligence capabilities. This is in addition to the $2.8 billion in debt financing the company disclosed when it announced its intention to acquire AOL, debt that may finance the AOL transaction and future acquisitions.
What’s next?
Bending Spoons said it intends to pursue latest acquisitions that may expand its portfolio of consumer and enterprise digital products and currently has the financial resources to pursue more significant goals in the future, as confirmed by its decision to acquire Eventbrite.
AOL and Vimeo already enjoy significantly more recognition than previous targets, although AOL’s terms remain undisclosed. Properties also have some scope. In announcing the deal with AOL, Bending Spoons said AOL stays one of the 10 most used email providers in the world, with 8 million day by day lively users and 30 million monthly lively users. (Not long before the AOL acquisition, Bending Spoons was also roach look creator of the Elysium application and Typeform, a Barcelona-based SaaS company known for its form creation tools.)
Possibly to support its ongoing acquisition efforts, it is also offering job opportunities in a number of roles, with latest hires initially based at its headquarters in Milan, before being given the option to work from offices in London, Madrid and Warsaw, or work remotely.
In fact, despite warning candidates that Bending Spoons is a “challenging environment,” the company said it has already received greater than 600,000 applications for the 2025 job, a number that may likely increase as recent openings generate additional interest.