Bending Spoons
We Buy Apps You Love. We Fire the People Who Made Them.
$32B
Value Extracted
9
Key Initiatives
The Story
Bending Spoons is private equity with a developer blog. The playbook is simple and repeatable: acquire a beloved software brand, fire most of the staff within weeks of close, migrate the remaining product into Bending Spoons' shared backend, raise prices on the captive user base, and pocket the margin. The rate of acquisition is now accelerating faster than the brand memorials can keep up.
Key Achievements
Evernote (acquired January 2023) — cut 129 employees in February 2023, laid off essentially all remaining staff in July 2023, migrated the product to Bending Spoons' own engineering org; free tier throttled to 50 notes and one notebook; Personal tier walked from $7.99 to $14.99/month
Mosaic Group (January 2024) — acquired and laid off all 330 staff on the day of close; the product and the payroll were resolved in the same press cycle
Meetup (January 2024) — significant February 2024 workforce reduction followed by subscription restructuring, introducing mandatory fees on organizers whose groups had never charged a cent in the 22 years prior
WeTransfer (July 2024) — ~75% of staff laid off September 2024 per CEO Luca Ferrari's own internal confirmation; in July 2025 pushed a TOS update granting a 'perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license' to train ML models on user uploads, rolled it back within 48 hours after a 25% surge in competitor signups and a public boycott from the original founders
Brightcove (closed November 2024, $233M) — laid off two-thirds of US employees on March 19, 2025, less than four months post-close
Komoot (March 2025, ~€300M) — Europe's leading outdoor-routing platform with 45 million users; the engineering team that built the product over 15 years was reduced to maintenance staffing while Bending Spoons migrates route-planning features onto its shared runtime
AOL (October 2025, $1.5B from Yahoo) — yes, AOL; betting the captive email base annuitizes for another decade before migration fatigue clears the balance sheet
Vimeo ($1.38B, closed November 2025 → mass layoff January 20, 2026) — the majority of the workforce fired via email 61 days after close, including the entire core video engineering team that served ~250M users; second workforce reduction in under six months (Vimeo had already cut 10% in September 2025 before the deal closed)
Raised $155M in equity February 2024 at a $2.55B valuation; 2026 IPO rumored at ~$12B — capital markets are pricing the acquisition velocity itself as the asset, which means the pace is mechanically required to increase through 2027
We do not acquire companies to preserve them. We acquire them to resolve them. A resolved company has one engineering team, one finance team, one shared backend, and a subscription price that reflects the true cost of captivity.
L. Ferrari
Chief Portfolio Resolution Officer
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