What's the Secret of the Spoon-Bending Company?

Why is Bending Spoons making all these acquisitions?

Why Is the Spoon-Bending Company Making All These Acquisitions?

The most common advice in management strategy is “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” I’m sure you’ve heard this at least dozens of times. It’s simple but very valid advice. Of course, being simple doesn’t mean it’s easy to apply.

In my article where I asked “Can a Billion-Dollar Company Be Built Alone?”, I mentioned that a portfolio approach with this meaning would be the most important method on this path. Actually, there are investor companies that work this way. For example, Bending Spoons, whose AOL acquisition surprised us recently. Actually, the part that surprised me was: was AOL still alive? AOL (American Online), one of the first and most important internet service providers in the industry, was still alive and worth $1.5 billion. Most of us know AOL, but who is this Bending Spoons?

Bending Spoons was founded in Milan, Italy, in 2013 by Luca Ferrari and his partners. Describing itself as “private equity hipsters,” Bending Spoons specializes in acquiring and revitalizing software and content companies. The company focused on this area with the experience it gained from an initially failed startup (Evertale) and added businesses with potential but not shining enough to its portfolio.

With these acquisitions, Bending Spoons became one of Europe’s most valuable technology startups in just a few years. Its annual revenue is over $1.2 billion and it has dozens of companies in its portfolio.

Actually, in our country, Mediazone, the parent company of Onedio.com, does what Bending Spoons does by acquiring content-producing companies. Similar logic, similar work. Mediazone is also quite successful, especially in our country. This should also be noted.

Acquisition Portfolio

Bending Spoons is known for its aggressive acquisition strategy. Since its foundation, the company has made acquisitions in a wide range, from small applications (the first acquisition was $10,000) to billion-dollar big deals. In recent years, we can see that it targets established but stagnant brands in the face of new competition.

Some of Bending Spoons’ notable acquisitions include:

• AOL: Announced to be acquired from Yahoo for $1.5 billion in October 2025.

• Vimeo: Acquired in September 2025 with a deal worth $1.38 billion.

• Evernote: (2022/2023) Well-known note-taking platform.

• WeTransfer: (2024) Dutch file-sharing service.

• Meetup: (2024) Community platform for in-person and virtual events.

• Brightcove: (early 2025) Enterprise video platform, taken private from a public company.

• Remini: (2021) AI-powered photo editing application.

• StreamYard: (2024) Live streaming application.

• Mosaic Group Assets: (2024) Assets of a New York-based mobile app developer (only intellectual property was targeted by laying off all employees).

Acquisition Reasons and Strategic Goals

Bending Spoons’ basic acquisition thesis is to focus on companies with consumer-facing products that have high value potential but have historically failed to achieve this or are under debt. Actually, looking at the companies they acquired, I outlined their strategies as follows:

Loyal User Base and Revenue Stream: Acquiring companies with a loyal user base that trusts the service and is unlikely to leave despite price increases. For example, AOL is an iconic business with approximately 8 million daily and 30 million monthly active users. Additionally, a common point is that these companies usually have a steady cash flow (mostly subscription-based software).

Operational Inefficiency Opportunity: The acquired companies are generally those where old managers made big mistakes in management. Bending Spoons can significantly increase profitability by correcting these mistakes and reducing costs.

Data Assets: The acquisition of old platforms like AOL must have been made strategically not only for user numbers but also for access to the data produced (training sets). Because these old platforms host large, proprietary historical datasets that will be used to feed Bending Spoons’ future AI development.

Long-Term Ownership: Unlike traditional investors, Bending Spoons approaches companies with the philosophy of “owning and operating forever.” In other words, the opposite of the buy-grow-sell logic. This long-term approach allows it to make long-term investments in the companies it acquires.

Operational Strategy and Value Creation Mechanism

Bending Spoons uses its operational and technological infrastructure as leverage in the companies it acquires. CEO Luca Ferrari also summarizes this approach as “we are 25 percent investment, 75 percent technology company.” This part about using operational and technology infrastructure as leverage is really important. For example, they use the workforce in their companies in different geographies as a kind of cost arbitrage. For instance, American employees in high-cost centers (like Silicon Valley) are laid off and operations are moved to the central team in Milan. The layoff of 75% of the personnel immediately after WeTransfer’s acquisition is another painful example of this. Ferrari states that this “painful transition” is necessary to make the company successful in the long term. I don’t know if employees think the same way.

It should be noted that using a central infrastructure platform technologically also has important contributions. This internal platform contains more than 50 pieces, from A/B testing infrastructure to payment management systems. When a new company is added to the portfolio, these central services are immediately applied, providing great advantages in terms of cost.

Culture and Talent Strategy

Bending Spoons’ operational capability is largely based on its extraordinary and high-performance corporate culture. To achieve this high performance, they focus on raw talent rather than experience, usually hiring fresh university graduates or young engineers.

They have a company culture coded with strict principles like “Uncompromising Excellence” and “Relentless Simplification.” Despite this, Bending Spoons claims that the employee turnover rate is at a low level of about 1% per year, which is much lower than the industry average. They are also very good at quickly shifting employees to opportunities that will create the highest impact to minimize organizational friction. This creates a cost advantage for the company while also accelerating employees’ continuous learning and development.

The Importance of Economies of Scale

Actually, if you’ve noticed, the most important concept that Bending Spoons relies on in these acquisitions is economies of scale. If you grow and diversify your business enough, you can provide cost and operational advantages in many items. In today’s world where artificial intelligence and agentic coding concepts are on the rise, I believe we need to rethink this concept of economies of scale.