Bending Spoons

Overview

Bending Spoons S.p.A. is a Milan-based technology company that buys established software brands with existing users, rebuilds them with a small central engineering team, and holds them indefinitely rather than selling them on. Founded in 2013, it spent almost a decade bootstrapped before its first equity round, then listed on the Nasdaq in July 2026 at $29 a share and used its public currency to buy Airtable weeks later (Sifted; PitchBook). By March 2026 its portfolio reached more than 500 million monthly active users and more than 9 million paying customers, with 2025 revenue of $1.31 billion (PitchBook).

Bootstrapped for a decade, then public in a day

Bending Spoons began in failure. After cofounders Luca Ferrari and Matteo Danieli wound up their previous startup, the diary app Evertale, they kept the remaining $40,000 and founded Bending Spoons in 2013 (Sifted). They then did something almost unheard of for a company that would later be worth tens of billions: they bootstrapped for nearly a decade, funding growth from reinvestment, secondaries and debt — Ferrari says the company raised more than $500 million in debt before ever taking primary equity (Sifted). The first equity round did not come until September 2022, a $340 million investment from global investors including actor Ryan Reynolds (Sifted). By February 2024 a further $155 million round let the company disclose a post-money valuation for the first time: $2.55 billion, making it Italy’s third startup unicorn by order of announcement (Sifted).

The public listing compressed that slow decade into a single morning. Bending Spoons priced its Nasdaq IPO at $29 a share on 1 July 2026, above its marketed $26–28 range, raising $1.68 billion at a valuation of about $18 billion — $18.4 billion at pricing by one account — and closed its first day at $40.50, up 39.7%, for a market capitalisation of roughly $25.7 billion (PitchBook; FastForward). Nearly 41% of the IPO proceeds, $683.6 million, went to existing shareholders selling stock, with Baillie Gifford holding 15%, Galileo Quattordici 11.6% and Cox Investment Holdings 9.3% before the listing (PitchBook). The numbers behind the debut explain why investors paid up: revenue had grown from $387.1 million in 2023 to $671.1 million in 2024 and $1.31 billion in 2025, while monthly active users rose from 111 million in December 2023 to more than 500 million by March 2026 and paying customers tripled from 3 million to 9 million (PitchBook). Ferrari had long framed the ambition in deliberately immodest terms — building a company that would be “a little bit like if Berkshire Hathaway and Google had a baby,” a hybrid with both a capital-allocation engine and a technology-operator engine (Sifted).

The playbook: buy it, rebuild it, keep it

Bending Spoons does not build products from scratch. It buys digital products that have already proven a fit with their market but that it believes have “substantial untapped potential,” then improves their product and technology with its own central team and shared tools for payments, data analysis and product testing (Sifted; FastForward). PitchBook’s summary of the method is blunter: snap up established yet sluggish internet businesses with healthy footprints and active users, then take a private-equity-style approach of investment and cost-cutting to return them to profitability — while also writing code, rebuilding backends, upgrading features and reworking pricing (PitchBook). Ferrari’s own stated difference from private equity is the exit that never comes: once the vision for an acquired business is clear, the company tries to close the gap between the status quo and that vision “as quickly and as fully as we can,” with the aim of operating the business forever (PetaPixel).

Evernote is the case study the company itself points to. Acquired in early 2023 after being agreed in November 2022, the note-taking app had about $100 million in recurring revenue and millions of customers but had been unprofitable for years (Sifted). By mid-2023 Bending Spoons had laid off nearly all of Evernote’s roughly 250 staff in the US and Chile and moved the remaining operations to Europe; one account puts the workforce cut at 341 people down to 60, with management layers cut from four to two (Sifted; FastForward). Paid plans were roughly doubled, to $129.99 and $169.99 a year, and the free plan was cut back to push users toward paid tiers (Sifted). Ferrari’s defence is the operating result: feature releases rose about 50% in 2023 and doubled in 2024, new registrations grew 29% after years of roughly 20% annual declines, and revenue per user grew 2.5 times (FastForward). WeTransfer followed the same template faster: acquired in July 2024, it faced a plan to cut about 75% of its staff — roughly 260 of about 350 people — announced within weeks of the deal (FastForward; PetaPixel). Earlier, smaller deals set the pattern: video editor Splice in 2018, AI photo app Remini in 2021, and the January 2024 purchase of Mosaic Group’s apps for more than $100 million alongside Meetup (FastForward; Sifted).

The 2026 deals — and the concentration behind them

The angle most coverage misses is how concentrated this empire actually is. Bending Spoons owns about 50 companies, but about ten of them generate nearly 80% of its revenue, and Dealroom’s analysis finds acquisitions explain most of its revenue growth — even though businesses already in the portfolio have also grown (FastForward). Adjusted operating margin rose from 36% in 2023 to 47% in 2025 and 51% in the first quarter of 2026, on Q1 revenue of about $601 million, 84% of it subscriptions (FastForward). The implication is structural: a company that grows mainly by buying must keep buying bigger, because each new deal has to move a larger base. The two September 2026 deals are exactly that escalation — both are former 2021-era darlings bought at a fraction of their peak prices.

Deal	Price	Target’s scale at deal time	Discount to peak
Airtable, agreed Aug 2026, completed Sep 2026	$1.28B cash (~$2.25B equity with net cash)	~$480M ARR, +20% YoY (June 2026)	Peak $11B+ in 2021; secondary ~$4B early 2026
Miro, agreed 10 Sep 2026, completed 26 Oct 2026	$1.36B cash ($1.79B equity)	~$600M ARR, 90% from businesses	$17.5B price tag in late 2021, ~92% dip

Airtable was Bending Spoons’ first acquisition since going public (TechCrunch). The spreadsheet-and-database company had raised more than $1.4 billion and peaked above $11 billion in 2021, but its shares traded on secondary markets at about a $4 billion valuation earlier in 2026; with net cash, the equity value at sale was about $2.25 billion (TechCrunch). Its business was still growing — annual recurring revenue of about $480 million in June 2026, up more than 20% year over year, serving over 500,000 organizations including 80% of the Fortune 100 — and in January 2026 it had launched Superagent, an orchestration platform for teams of AI agents (TechCrunch). Miro, agreed five weeks later and completed on 26 October 2026 (Business Wire), repeated the shape: $1.36 billion in cash, $1.79 billion in equity value, for a whiteboarding company once tagged at $17.5 billion in late 2021, now carrying about $600 million in annual recurring revenue, 90% of it from businesses and enterprises, and more than 4 million paying users (TechCrunch). TechCrunch’s verdict on the pair is that Bending Spoons is “buying once-sought-after software companies for pennies on the dollar” — the 2021 SaaS repricing, turned into a corporate strategy (TechCrunch).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state a founding city for Bending Spoons, since its sources disagree on whether the 2013 founding was in Milan or Copenhagen; it asserts only the founding year and the Milan headquarters. It does not give deal prices for Vimeo, AOL or Eventbrite, which appear only in secondary summaries not read in full for this profile. It does not claim that Airtable’s staff will be cut under Bending Spoons; the Evernote and WeTransfer cuts are documented history, but no such plan for Airtable appears in the sources read here. And it does not present the $112 million 2025 net loss as reconciled against other secondary summaries — that figure is PitchBook’s filing-based number.