Software

Why Bending Spoons Is Rebooting Mature Software Companies

Bending Spoons has built an unusual acquisition machine around Evernote, Vimeo, AOL, Airtable and other established digital businesses, keeping the products while radically reshaping the companies behind them.

Bending Spoons has spent the past few years acquiring an increasingly familiar collection of digital businesses. Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL, Eventbrite and Airtable are now part of the Milan-based technology group, while in September it agreed a $1.355 billion deal to acquire collaborative workspace company Miro.

At first glance, there is little to connect them. A note-taking application, a video platform, an events marketplace and an email business do not form an obvious software suite, nor do they serve a common industry. Yet Bending Spoons believes the same operating methods can be applied across all of them. It buys established digital products, reorganises the businesses behind them, applies its own technology and commercial expertise, and uses the resulting earnings to support further acquisitions.

What Is Bending Spoons?

Bending Spoons was founded in 2013 by a group of Italian entrepreneurs whose previous startup, Evertale, had failed. Rather than immediately trying to build another large consumer technology product from scratch, the founders began buying existing apps. Its first acquisition reportedly cost around $10,000. Thirteen years later, the company is making transactions worth more than $1 billion.

The parent company, Bending Spoons S.p.A., remains incorporated and headquartered in Italy, with its principal office in Milan. It listed on Nasdaq in July 2026 and reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission as a foreign private issuer, which has made considerably more information about its finances and operating model publicly available.

Bending Spoons describes itself as an acquisition-led technology company built around the idea that operational excellence can generate efficient growth. Its stated process is to acquire digital businesses, undertake what it calls “deep transformations”, continue optimising them and then reinvest the resulting earnings into further purchases. It says it has followed this strategy for more than a decade and has never sold a material business.

The scale of the portfolio is now substantial. By March 2026, Bending Spoons said its businesses served more than 500 million monthly active users and more than nine million monthly paying customers.

The Bending Spoons Portfolio

The range of these businesses is what makes the strategy difficult to classify neatly. A conventional vertical software roll-up typically acquires several businesses serving related sectors or workflows, creating opportunities to share customers, specialist knowledge or distribution. As No Latency has previously explored in its guide to the vertical SaaS roll-up, the term “roll-up” describes a pattern of repeated acquisition rather than one fixed operating model.

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Bending Spoons clearly fits the acquisition pattern, but not the vertical one. AOL and Evernote do not share customers simply because they have the same owner, and there is no indication that Vimeo and WeTransfer are being assembled into an integrated software suite. What Bending Spoons thinks can be shared is not principally the products, but the expertise and infrastructure required to operate them.

What Kind Of Companies Does Bending Spoons Buy?

The reputation Bending Spoons has acquired can make it tempting to describe it as a buyer of distressed technology businesses. Evernote had fallen a long way from its position as one of Silicon Valley's best-known productivity startups, while Vimeo had struggled to generate sustained growth after becoming a standalone public company.

That description becomes less convincing as the acquisition targets get larger. Airtable was growing annual recurring revenue by more than 20% to approximately $480 million when Bending Spoons agreed to buy it for an enterprise value of $1.285 billion. The acquisition completed on 4 September 2026. Miro, whose acquisition remains subject to completion, has around $600 million in annual recurring revenue, nearly 90% of it coming from business and enterprise customers, and says it serves more than 100 million users across 250,000 organisations.

What these companies have in common is therefore not necessarily decline. They have products with established demand, substantial revenues and a level of customer adoption that would be expensive and uncertain to recreate from scratch. Bending Spoons says it looks for digital businesses where it sees significant room for improvement and where future performance can be forecast with reasonable confidence.

That leaves an important distinction between the product and the organisation operating it. A mature software product may contain years of engineering work, established customer habits, recognised branding, integrations, stored data and recurring subscription revenue. None of those assets necessarily depends on preserving the company that originally assembled them in its existing form.

Evernote shows how seriously Bending Spoons takes that distinction.

What Happened To Evernote?

By the time Bending Spoons acquired Evernote in 2023, the company was no longer the emblematic growth business it had once been, but the underlying product retained a large installed base and deeply embedded customer behaviour. Millions of users had accumulated years of notes, documents and workflows inside it.

Evernote employed 341 full-time-equivalent team members at the time of acquisition. By the end of 2024, Bending Spoons had reduced that figure to 60 and cut the number of management layers from four to two. This was not simply a case of removing some duplicated corporate functions after a takeover. More than four-fifths of the organisation had disappeared.

The product, however, did not enter maintenance mode. Bending Spoons says Evernote's release frequency increased after the acquisition, with the company introducing new features, redesigning parts of the application and adding AI functionality. The commercial model changed as well, including tighter restrictions around free usage and changes to subscription pricing.

Expanded User Spending Despite Criticism

Those decisions have generated considerable criticism among some users, particularly those who had been using Evernote cheaply or for free. Yet Bending Spoons reported average net revenue retention of 99% for Evernote between the first quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2026. In practical terms, revenue lost through cancellations and contractions was almost entirely offset by retained or expanded spending among the existing customer base.

Bending Spoons then went a step further. After restructuring Evernote, it reassigned roughly half of the remaining team to Harvest, the time-tracking business it had subsequently acquired. Evernote continued to operate while some of the people running it were redeployed elsewhere in the portfolio.

This gets close to the defining feature of the model. Bending Spoons is not simply asking how many employees Evernote needs. It is questioning how much of a permanent, self-contained company needs to exist around Evernote at all.

The Bending Spoons Method

Bending Spoons calls the central capability supporting its businesses its “Platform”. The terminology can be misleading because this is not a platform that customers of its different products use together. The company defines it instead as the combination of its people, proprietary technologies and proprietary data.

The integration therefore takes place primarily behind the products. Bending Spoons can apply technical tools, product-development practices, pricing expertise, marketing analysis and accumulated data across different acquisitions.

Its public description of the acquisition process is unusually direct. Bending Spoons says transformations typically involve reorganising teams, overhauling technology, redesigning user interfaces, accelerating product development and improving marketing and monetisation. AI is increasingly both part of the products themselves and a tool used to implement these changes. Staff can also be moved between businesses, while technical tools, product-development practices and lessons about user behaviour or monetisation can be applied across the portfolio.

Vimeo does not need to become interoperable with Evernote for this system to create value. What matters is that the people operating Vimeo can benefit from techniques, technology and knowledge developed while Bending Spoons was running other digital businesses.

How the Bending Spoons Model Actually Works

This places Bending Spoons within a broader family of acquisition-driven software businesses, but with an unusually centralised operational philosophy. No Latency's overview of the six main SaaS models uses Constellation Software as the classic example of a capital roll-up, where the principal competitive advantage lies in disciplined acquisition and capital allocation rather than one dominant product.

Bending Spoons shares that compounding logic, but appears to intervene much more heavily in the businesses it acquires.

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Bringing Established Businesses Back To Startup Mode

The scale of those interventions can make Bending Spoons' total headcount misleading. The group reported 2,284 full-time-equivalent team members, including contractors, at the end of the first quarter of 2026, up from 785 at the end of 2024. Most of that increase did not come from conventional hiring. It came through acquisition.

AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo alone added 1,830 people during the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026. By the end of that period, Bending Spoons said it had already parted ways with many of them and expected only a few hundred of the original 1,830 to remain once the transformations were substantially complete later in 2026.

The company's own language helps explain the thinking. It places considerable emphasis on “talent density”, flat organisational structures and the dynamic deployment of staff across different businesses. At the end of the first quarter, 34% of its FTE team members were in technical roles and another 10% worked in product and growth. Forty per cent were based in the US and 21% in Italy.

Cost reduction is plainly part of the strategy, but Bending Spoons describes the objective more broadly as bringing established businesses back towards something closer to “startup mode”. The idea is that large technology organisations accumulate management layers, internal processes and specialist functions that may once have helped them scale, but later become obstacles to fast decision-making and efficient product development.

Cost Cutter Or Better Operator?

There is an obvious critical interpretation of the model. Bending Spoons can acquire a product with a loyal customer base, remove much of its workforce, constrain free usage, increase monetisation and benefit from the switching costs accumulated over years of customer use. The example of Evernote makes that argument easy to understand.

But cost cutting alone does not fully account for what Bending Spoons says it does after acquiring a business. It continues to invest in engineering and product development, and has published performance measures intended to show that smaller teams are improving products rather than merely maintaining them. At Vimeo, for example, Bending Spoons reported more than 30 product improvements during its early period of ownership, alongside a roughly 90% reduction in system-stability incidents and improvements to upload, search and customer-support performance. These are company-reported measures, but they are specific enough to test the proposition that restructuring is accompanied by operational improvement.

The tension may therefore be less straightforward than a choice between investment and extraction. Mature technology businesses can carry significant costs while still possessing products that customers value highly. If an acquirer can remove those costs without damaging the product, the previous organisation may simply have been more expensive than necessary.

How The Funding Model Sustains Itself

Revenue at Bending Spoons increased from $387 million in 2023 to $1.31 billion in 2025, with acquisition activity responsible for much of the expansion. In the second quarter of 2026, revenue reached $704 million, up 126% year on year, while organic revenue growth was only 3%.

The difference matters. Bending Spoons has not necessarily cracked the code of turning every mature software product into a fast-growing standalone business. Its model instead relies on acquiring revenues that already exist, improving the economics around them and then adding further businesses to the portfolio.

That is why the company describes its strategy as a compounding cycle. Stronger earnings make more capital available for acquisitions, which add more revenues and, if the restructuring process succeeds, further earnings. Unlike a traditional private-equity fund, Bending Spoons says it does not acquire companies with a planned resale in mind. It has never sold a material business.

Debt also plays an important role. Acquisition-led growth allows Bending Spoons to increase its scale faster than cash generation alone would permit, but it introduces an obvious dependency on the continuing performance of the portfolio. The more businesses the company acquires, and the larger the transactions become, the more consequential mistakes will be.

Bending Spoons In Numbers

Source: Bending Spoons SEC filings and investor announcements, 2026.

The closest comparison may therefore be a software roll-up in which the source of operating leverage is unusually broad. A vertical roll-up normally assumes that common ownership creates advantages because the acquired companies share a market. Bending Spoons is making a more ambitious claim: that digital businesses serving unrelated markets still share enough underlying operational machinery for one company to become unusually good at running all of them.

Why AI Could Make The Model More Powerful

Bending Spoons was following this strategy for years before generative AI became commercially important, so AI does not explain the business model. It may, however, strengthen some of the assumptions behind it.

Software development is one obvious area. If AI-assisted engineers can maintain, refactor and develop more code, then the number of people required to operate an established product may continue to fall. The same applies to customer support, marketing, analytics and other functions that Bending Spoons already tries to centralise or streamline.

The company itself places AI near the centre of many current transformations, both as a feature added to acquired products and as a tool used internally. The effect could therefore run in two directions. AI lowers barriers for small teams trying to create new software, but it may also lower the cost of operating mature software businesses at scale.

No Latency has previously looked at another consequence of the same change in its analysis of how AI is disrupting traditional seat-based SaaS pricing. As software requires less human input to produce a given amount of work, assumptions about how it should be priced begin to change. Bending Spoons raises the organisational version of that question: how many people are required to maintain and improve a product once the underlying technology becomes more productive?

In that sense, Bending Spoons is beginning to look like an unusually large experiment in how far those limits can be pushed.

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How Far Can The Model Scale?

The next phase of Bending Spoons' expansion should provide a much tougher test than Evernote did. Airtable is a significant enterprise platform rather than a faded consumer application, and its annual recurring revenue was still growing by more than 20% when the acquisition was announced. Miro, if its transaction completes, will add another large enterprise business with roughly $600 million in ARR.

That creates different risks. Product-specific expertise may become harder to replace as Bending Spoons moves into software embedded deeply within business workflows. Enterprise customers may expect a different relationship with suppliers from individual Evernote users. The organisational knowledge required to develop a collaborative workspace or database platform may also prove harder to centralise than some consumer applications.

There is a capital problem too. As Bending Spoons grows, each acquisition has to become larger to make a meaningful difference to the group. The progression from a first deal worth around $10,000 to transactions exceeding $1 billion illustrates both the success of the model and the challenge it creates. The company cannot continue compounding at the same rate indefinitely by acquiring small applications.

Bending Spoons nevertheless sees a large field ahead. Its filings say it has identified more than 1,000 potential acquisition targets, representing hundreds of billions of dollars in aggregate annual revenue. The crucial question is no longer whether it can apply its method once or twice, but whether the same operational discipline survives as the acquired businesses become larger, more complex and further removed from one another.

How Much Of A Software Company Do You Need?

The software industry has traditionally treated a successful product and the organisation surrounding it as parts of the same economic unit. As products become successful, engineering teams grow, new management layers appear, sales and marketing departments expand, and specialist corporate functions accumulate around them.

Evernote, for instance, still has its brand, customers, stored notes and subscription revenues. It continues to receive new features. Yet most of the organisation operating it when Bending Spoons arrived has disappeared, and some of the people who remained were subsequently moved onto another product.

Whether Bending Spoons’ approach works everywhere remains to be seen, but the company seems to be testing a provocative idea: how much company does a successful software product really need?