Bending Spoons Business Strategy Overview

What is Bending Spoons?

The Italian company that just went public,

it's one of the most unheard of tech companies

that operates a lot more like a private equity firm.

They own Evernote, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, StreamYard, Brightcove, and

last year they bought Vimeo for $1.4 billion

and AOL for $1.5 billion.

All in all, they've probably acquired more than 50 companies in total.

Their playbook is pretty simple.

They find these popular apps that people love

but have stopped growing, likely because they're being run inefficiently.

Then Bending Spoon goes in, buys it,

and then makes a lot of changes including squeezing it.

For example, they laid off nearly all of Evernote's staff,

a large portion of Vimeo's, and around 75% of WeTransfer's.

They go in and add all of these product and technical improvements,

and then they typically go in and raise prices.

For example, Evernote's personal plan went up 63%

and StreamYard's went up 80%.

Notably, most private equity firms acquire a company

usually to flip it or just let it run on its own.

However, Bending Spoon actually does neither and they buy to hold.

They pull every product into this one central operation

in Milan that shares the same engineering team,

a lot of the same infra, payment systems across the entire portfolio.

According to them, AI now also co-writes more than 90% of their code,

up from under 10% a year ago.

In terms of their business, revenue went up from $387 million in 2023.

to about $1.3 billion last year.

They're also currently profitable at the operating level and

have identified over a thousand more companies they could buy.

The reason Bending Spoons has all of these targets to choose from

is because the AI boom has made this entire

generation of pre-AI software companies cheap and unloved.

We saw a lot of this with the SaaSpocalypse

in the stock market where investors were getting scared

that AI can let anyone spin up software

in an which signaled to them that

all these older subscription software companies could get undercut or replaced

when the cost of creation is going to zero.

Yet, Bending Spoon continues to make the opposite bet,

believing that there's this whole cohort of brands

that still have super loyal audiences and

that the same AI that everyone's afraid of

is actually the same thing that will enable them to run more efficiently.