Bending Spoons Is Quietly Buying the Internet

You may never have downloaded an app called Bending Spoons. In fact, there isn’t one. But there is a decent chance you have used something the company owns. You might have written notes in Evernote, sent a presentation through WeTransfer, streamed a video on Vimeo, bought a ticket through Eventbrite, joined a Meetup group, planned a hike on Komoot, opened an AOL inbox or recorded a livestream with StreamYard. More recently, you might have built a workflow in Airtable. And if Bending Spoons’ latest deal closes, Miro will join the list too. The strange thing about one of Europe’s most important technology companies is that almost nobody encounters the Bending Spoons brand itself. They encounter its empire.

That empire has become enormous with extraordinary speed. Bending Spoons went public on Nasdaq in July 2026 under the ticker BSP. Its shares jumped sharply on their first day of trading, and although the stock has since cooled, the company was still worth roughly $19.3 billion as of 5 October. In Q2 2026 alone it generated $704 million of revenue, $240 million of operating income and $177 million of net income. And yet describing Bending Spoons as an “app company” barely explains what is interesting about it. It is closer to a technology operator, an acquisition machine and a software laboratory rolled into one. Rather than spending years trying to invent the next successful startup, Bending Spoons increasingly buys products that have already proved people want them, and asks whether it can run them dramatically better.

The company that was born because its first startup failed

The story begins with a failure. Before Bending Spoons, several of its founders worked on Evertale, a startup attempting something surprisingly futuristic for 2010: an AI-powered diary that would automatically create a record of a person’s life using information from their phone. Evertale raised roughly €1 million, built a team and launched the product. It never found meaningful product-market fit. By 2013, it was running out of money. After liquidation, around $40,000 remained, and that money became the starting capital for Bending Spoons.

The failure produced an unusually important strategic insight. The founders concluded that finding product-market fit contains an enormous amount of uncertainty: brilliant teams can create products nobody ultimately wants, while imperfect companies can find themselves sitting on products people love. Operational excellence, however, seemed much less dependent on luck. You could deliberately become better at engineering, pricing, marketing, organization and product development. So instead of betting the company repeatedly on discovering demand from zero, they decided to buy businesses where demand had already been proven and concentrate on becoming exceptionally good operators. The first acquisition reportedly cost just $10,000. Thirteen years later, the same company is signing billion-dollar deals.

Even the ridiculous-sounding name comes from this period. Co-founder Matteo Danieli had watched The Matrix, including the famous scene in which a child appears to bend a spoon with his mind. The founders liked what it represented: ambitious thinking, rationality and the effort required to accomplish something apparently impossible. They also liked the irony. Five people, $40,000 and one failed startup calling themselves Bending Spoons was deliberately a little absurd. Today the joke has aged remarkably well.

The anti-startup startup

Most technology mythology is about creation. Find an underserved problem, develop a product, achieve product-market fit and scale it into a huge company. Bending Spoons essentially reversed that sequence. It treats product-market fit as something that can be acquired.

Its official model is remarkably simple: acquire, transform and optimize, then reinvest. The difficulty is in executing it. Bending Spoons looks for digital businesses it believes can be substantially improved, preferably with a large existing revenue base and economics that can be forecast several years into the future. Particularly attractive companies tend to have strong customer retention, revenue that does not depend excessively on constantly buying new customers through advertising, years of usable customer data and relatively limited risk of being destroyed by an AI competitor after integration. Size itself is attractive: Bending Spoons argues that the effort required to transform a business does not rise proportionally with its revenue, meaning that fixing a $500 million business can be far more economically attractive than fixing a $50 million one.

This is not indiscriminate shopping. In 2025, Bending Spoons sourced more than 2,500 possible acquisitions, subjected roughly 200 to deeper analysis, and completed just six. It now says it has identified more than 1,000 potential future targets representing almost $400 billion in combined annual revenue. There is effectively a permanent M&A funnel sitting beside the company’s product organization.

The inspirations are equally revealing. In its IPO filing, Bending Spoons did not mainly name fashionable SaaS founders or Silicon Valley consumer-app legends. It cited Henry Singleton’s Teledyne and Tom Murphy’s Capital Cities, then Broadcom, Danaher and TransDigm: companies famous for disciplined acquisitions, decentralized or highly efficient operations and long-term capital allocation. That tells you what Bending Spoons really wants to become: not the next Instagram, but a technology-era compounder. It wants the capability of buying businesses, improving them, generating more cash and using that cash to buy larger businesses to become an institutional competitive advantage of its own.

There is another crucial distinction from private equity. Bending Spoons repeatedly says it does not buy companies with the intention of selling them again. It says it has never sold a material business. The objective is permanent ownership. In that sense, its philosophy is closer to an industrial holding company, except the factories are apps, SaaS platforms and internet brands.

What happens after Bending Spoons buys you

This is where the model becomes both impressive and controversial.

After signing an acquisition, Bending Spoons assembles a task force drawn from software engineering, data science, AI research, product, design and growth. That team studies the acquired company’s technology, customer data, organization, pricing and product roadmap. It then creates what is effectively a new operating blueprint. The goal is not gentle integration. It is to decide what the best possible version of the business should look like, then close the gap as quickly as possible. Bending Spoons says transformations generally involve organizational restructuring, technology overhauls, redesigned user interfaces, faster product development, and new approaches to marketing and monetization; historically, the largest transformation phase has usually been completed within the first year.

There is evidence that this approach can produce genuine product improvement. Since purchasing Evernote in January 2023, Bending Spoons says it has released more than 200 features and improvements and made syncing up to three times faster. At Komoot it reports more than 80 improvements and a new Apple Watch experience. At StreamYard, more than 50 updates include 4K local recording and AI editing. After acquiring Vimeo in late 2025, the company says it released more than 30 improvements; by Q2 2026 it reported that system-stability incidents had fallen by about 90%, upload and search performance had improved by at least 30%, and customer-support resolution times had materially declined. At Eventbrite, it says it shipped almost 40 product improvements while increasing first-party advertising revenue by roughly 20% and cutting paid customer-acquisition expenditure by 30% by removing spending it judged unprofitable.

One of the clearest earlier success stories is Remini, the AI photo-enhancement app acquired in 2021. Bending Spoons rewrote its codebase, changed its UX and monetization and expanded its AI capabilities. By 2025, the company says Remini had more than five times the monthly active users and more than nine times the revenue it had around the time of acquisition. That is exactly what the Bending Spoons thesis looks like when it works: acquire something already valuable, then extract substantially more potential from the same underlying product.

The secret weapon may not be the apps at all

A casual view of Bending Spoons sees a collection of unrelated products. Note-taking, file transfers, events, video hosting, hiking, pet tracking and enterprise databases do not appear to have much in common. But the products are not really the common denominator. The operating system behind them is.

Bending Spoons has developed internal technologies that can be reused across multiple companies. Its website names systems such as Minerva for predicting user lifetime value, Juno for multi-channel payments, Xina for marketing attribution, Matrix for spreading validated UX patterns between products and Pico for high-throughput data ingestion. Instead of every acquired company rebuilding the same analytics, payment, experimentation and growth infrastructure from scratch, parts of that infrastructure can be centralized and applied repeatedly.

The data layer is particularly interesting. Bending Spoons says it ran around 3,000 product experiments in 2025 and was processing approximately 3.8 billion data points per day in Q1 2026. That creates an unusual flywheel. An experiment in one product can produce information about subscription conversion, churn, onboarding, pricing or UI behaviour that makes the company slightly smarter when operating another product, or even when deciding how much to pay for its next acquisition. The company explicitly says historical performance across its portfolio allows it to develop benchmarks for metrics such as subscription conversion and revenue retention before buying a new business. The more companies Bending Spoons operates, the more data it collects; the more data it collects, the more confidently it may be able to price, acquire and transform the next one.

That is a much more defensible strategy than simply “buy apps and cut costs.” Anyone with capital can bid for a company. Replicating a decade of product experiments, internal tooling and operational data is harder.

AI is less of a product story than a productivity story

Bending Spoons is also an interesting AI company precisely because it does not primarily market itself as one. It was experimenting with AI back in Evertale in 2010, long before generative AI became a boardroom obsession. Today AI appears throughout its products, from Remini to Vimeo, but its more radical use may be internal.

At the beginning of 2025, fewer than 10% of Bending Spoons engineering pull requests were authored or co-authored by AI. By the end of Q1 2026 that figure had climbed above 90%, with roughly 70% authored by AI alone. Bending Spoons says AI has become especially useful when engineers need to understand and modify enormous legacy codebases inherited through acquisitions, exactly the sort of work its business model constantly creates. Revenue per full-time-equivalent core “Spooner” rose from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, with AI cited as one contributor to the productivity increase.

Then there is Alt-Spooner, one of the more unusual details buried inside the company’s 2026 results. Bending Spoons created an internal personal AI agent with access equivalent to the employee using it, capable of working across that person’s history and connected accounts. It runs on models hosted by Bending Spoons but can switch between models. After being rolled out company-wide in early July, the system processed more than 100 billion tokens in its first three weeks. This is the kind of experiment that matters because it reveals how Bending Spoons thinks about AI: not as a separate “AI strategy”, but as another piece of infrastructure that should make the entire organization faster.

800,000 applications, 286 hires

Its approach to people is arguably even more extreme.

Bending Spoons received approximately 800,000 job applications in 2025. Around 60,000 candidates completed practical tests, approximately 3,300 reached interviews and just 286 were hired: fewer than four people for every 10,000 applications. Its Talent team itself includes software engineers, data scientists and AI researchers, because recruitment is treated as a problem to be measured and optimized rather than simply an HR function. The company’s cultural language includes “truth-seeking”, “extreme ownership” and “radical candor”, while its organizational philosophy favours small teams, minimal hierarchy and unusually high individual responsibility.

This obsessive focus on “talent density” is a crucial part of the acquisition model. Bending Spoons does not simply buy a company and leave its organization intact. It often replaces a large traditional structure with a much smaller number of people expected to operate with far greater leverage. Its filing describes acquired businesses as being brought “back to startup mode”: fewer rules, fewer processes, smaller teams and faster decisions. For a business student, this is a fascinating organizational bet. Most companies become more bureaucratic as they become larger. Bending Spoons is attempting the opposite: becoming a larger corporation while repeatedly forcing individual businesses back into startup-like operating structures.

But there is no way to discuss this model seriously without discussing its cost.

The uncomfortable side of the playbook

Large layoffs have followed several Bending Spoons acquisitions. After it acquired WeTransfer, the company confirmed plans to reduce roughly 75% of its workforce. After purchasing Komoot in 2025, around 80% of its employees were reportedly laid off. Evernote underwent major reductions and operations were shifted toward Europe. Vimeo also experienced significant cuts after its acquisition. And the scale of the strategy became particularly clear in Bending Spoons’ IPO documentation: AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo brought around 1,830 additional full-time-equivalent team members into the group, but Bending Spoons said that by the time their transformations were substantially complete, it expected only a few hundred to remain.

Bending Spoons is not hiding this. Its own prospectus acknowledges that transformations can involve controversial measures including workforce reductions. The company’s argument is essentially that the old organization is not sacred: if a much smaller structure can produce a better product at lower cost, it will rebuild around that structure quickly rather than preserve jobs or processes because they already exist.

That raises the most difficult question surrounding the company. Is Bending Spoons rescuing neglected technology products and making them sustainable, or is it financial engineering disguised as product excellence? The answer may be both less dramatic and more interesting: the model appears to depend on doing several things simultaneously. Bending Spoons genuinely invests in engineering and product improvement, but it is equally serious about pricing, monetization, headcount efficiency and margins. For customers, that can produce faster software and more features. For employees of an acquired company, it can mean that the company they joined effectively disappears.

The tension is fundamental to the model rather than an unfortunate side effect of it.

The numbers are spectacular, with one important catch

Financially, Bending Spoons has grown at a pace that would be remarkable for almost any European technology company. Revenue increased from $387 million in 2023 to $1.31 billion in 2025, an 84% compound annual growth rate. By March 2026, the portfolio was serving more than 500 million monthly active users and over 9 million monthly paying customers. Subscriptions are the economic foundation: they represented 84% of Q1 2026 revenue, with advertising contributing another 12%.

Q2 2026 was even more striking. Revenue reached $704 million, up 126% year on year. Operating income was $240 million, giving it a 34% operating margin, while net income reached $177 million, or 25% of revenue. On an adjusted basis, its operating margin was 54%. These are enormous margins for a company still expanding this quickly.

But there is a number that deserves equal attention: organic revenue growth was only 3% in Q2. Most of the 126% headline increase came from acquisitions including AOL, Eventbrite, Harvest, MileIQ, Tractive and Vimeo. That does not mean the model is failing (acquisition-led growth is the model) but it changes the way the numbers should be read. Investors are not simply betting that Bending Spoons’ existing apps will grow rapidly. They are betting that management can continue finding companies, buying them at sensible prices, improving their economics and repeating the process without eventually making a catastrophic acquisition.

That requires capital. At the end of Q2, Bending Spoons had $4.09 billion of net debt, although its leverage ratio stood at 2.4 times adjusted EBITDA. Its July IPO provided approximately $1.10 billion in net proceeds, giving the company more firepower for future acquisitions. This is a compounding machine, but it is not a risk-free one: the larger Bending Spoons becomes, the larger its acquisitions must become to materially move the company, and the cost of getting one wrong rises with it.

The public market is already forcing investors to price that tension. Bending Spoons surged on its Nasdaq debut and at one point commanded a much larger market capitalization, but by 5 October it was worth around $19.3 billion. Public shareholders appear intrigued by the model, but they are not blindly assuming every acquisition will work.

Airtable and Miro may reveal the next version of Bending Spoons

The most interesting development now is not simply that Bending Spoons continues acquiring. It is what it is buying.

In September, Bending Spoons completed its acquisition of Airtable. The transaction valued the operating business at an enterprise value of roughly $1.285 billion, despite Airtable producing about $480 million in annual recurring revenue and growing that figure more than 20% year on year as of June. More than 500,000 organizations use Airtable, including 80% of the Fortune 100.

Here is the fascinating part: Airtable was valued at around $11.7 billion in 2021. Bending Spoons effectively entered after the SaaS valuation bubble collapsed, purchasing a recognizable, growing enterprise-software company at a fraction of its former private-market valuation.

Then came Miro. On 10 September Bending Spoons agreed to acquire the collaboration platform for $1.355 billion in enterprise value, with an implied equity value of approximately $1.79 billion. Miro has roughly $600 million of annual recurring revenue, almost 90% generated from business and enterprise customers, around four million paying users and more than 250,000 organizational customers. The deal is expected to close in Q4, subject to approvals.

Miro’s last major fundraising round in 2022 valued it at $17.5 billion. The comparison is imperfect (private funding valuations and today’s acquisition enterprise value are different measures) but the direction is impossible to miss. A company once valued as one of the world’s most valuable SaaS startups is now being purchased for a fraction of that peak.

And this may be where Bending Spoons becomes more interesting still. Its earlier portfolio was heavily associated with consumer and prosumer subscriptions: photo apps, note-taking, file transfers and creator tools. Airtable and Miro are different. They are deeply embedded inside businesses. They have enterprise customers, recurring workflows and high switching costs. Bending Spoons appears to be moving upstream, from monetizing millions of individual users to owning pieces of infrastructure that companies rely on to work.

For a company whose acquisition criteria explicitly favour retention, predictable revenue and customers that do not need to be reacquired every month through advertising, it makes strategic sense. Miro and Airtable may not simply be two more trophies for the portfolio. They could signal the next chapter of the playbook.

The most interesting tech company that does not need to invent the next big thing

There is an almost contrarian quality to Bending Spoons’ rise. Technology companies are usually rewarded for telling investors what they have invented. Bending Spoons has become valuable by arguing that invention is only one part of technology: operating existing technology exceptionally well can be a business model of its own.

Its real product may therefore be Bending Spoons itself: the hiring system, the acquisition team, the data infrastructure, the AI tools, the product experiments, the monetization knowledge and the organizational culture. Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Airtable and Miro are businesses running on top of that system.

Whether the model can keep compounding is now the question. The easiest targets may eventually disappear. Debt can make mistakes more painful. Product communities can rebel against pricing changes or layoffs. Organic growth remains far lower than headline growth. And as Bending Spoons buys bigger companies, transforming them becomes a more complex experiment.

But there is also a powerful flywheel taking shape. More acquisitions create more data. More data improves operating decisions. Better operations create more earnings. More earnings, combined with debt and public-market capital, fund bigger acquisitions. Bigger acquisitions generate more data and more earnings again.

The startup world usually asks: “What should we build next?” Bending Spoons asks a different question: “What already works, and how much better could it work if we owned it?”

Thirteen years ago, that philosophy began with $40,000 left over from a failed startup.

Today, it is buying billion-dollar pieces of the internet.

Research updated 6 October 2026.