As Europe looks for ways to retain tech talent and build global businesses, an Italian company has quietly grown into one of the continent’s biggest tech success stories.
You may not know the company’s name, but you have likely used one of its products.
Founded in Milan in 2013, Bending Spoons has acquired a string of familiar digital brands, including Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo and Eventbrite in recent years.
Its annual revenue rose from $387 million (€338 mn) in 2023 to $1.31 billion (€1.14 bn) in 2025.
In July, the company went public on New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange.
So how did a company many people have never heard of come to own so many familiar names?
How has Bending Spoons grown so quickly?
Most tech companies try to invent a product and persuade people to use it. Bending Spoons often restructure an established product with a recognised name and existing customers that it believes could perform better under new ownership.
After a purchase, it may reorganise teams, rewrite software, redesign the product and change its marketing or pricing.
“We rearchitect the technology, product, and organisation, all of which is designed to speed up innovation, benefit customers, and strengthen business performance,” Nicolle Wasserman, People Operations lead at Bending Spoons, told Euronews Next.
Bending Spoons continues to develop the products it buys. It acquired, for instance, the video-editing app Splice in 2018 and the AI photo app Remini in 2021, then added new features to both.
The company says it has its own software engineers and tools for payments, data analysis and product testing that it uses across acquired businesses.
Large-scale layoffs have also repeatedly followed Bending Spoons’ acquisitions.
After it bought the note-taking app Evernote in early 2023, the company laid off most of its US- and Chile-based employees that July as it moved operations to Europe.
In 2024, it also said it planned to cut around 75% of the workforce at the file-sharing service WeTransfer, amounting to roughly 260 of its 350 workers.
Subscriptions are the main source of income across Bending Spoons’ portfolio, accounting for 84% of its revenue in the first quarter of 2026, according to company filings. By March 2026, its products reached more than 500 million monthly active users.
Buying more businesses is also different from growing the ones it already owns.
“Acquisition-led growth should not be confused with organic growth,” Yoram Wijngaarde, founder and CEO of global tech data firm Dealroom, told Euronews Next.
According to analysis from Dealroom, Bending Spoons’ acquisitions account for most of the dramatic increase in Bending Spoons’ revenue, although businesses it owned earlier have also grown.
Expansion in Europe
Bending Spoons is also expanding the teams behind its products. This week it opened an office in Warsaw, joining its headquarters in Milan and offices in London and Madrid.
The company said it had received 50,000 applications from candidates in Poland so far this year and plans to recruit locally for work across its businesses.
The Warsaw opening puts a concrete European dimension on a company whose products and customers span the world. But its wider significance, Wijngaarde suggested, lies in the kind of business it has built from Europe.
“Europe can be the buyer and operator of global software businesses, not just where companies are built before being acquired from abroad,” he said. “The contribution includes operating expertise and talent in Europe—not simply acquired assets. This complements, rather than replaces, building new companies.”
That does not mean other European firms could reproduce its results merely by buying software companies.
“Others can follow, but capital alone is insufficient,” Wijngaarde said. “The hard part is repeatedly improving products and economics while retaining users through major changes.”
Can it keep growing?
Keeping up its current strategy could become harder as Bending Spoons buys larger and more varied businesses.
Wijngaarde said the strategy could falter if Bending Spoons overpays for acquisitions, takes on too much debt or buys businesses it is less equipped to run.
“Cost savings are finite; ultimately, customers must keep finding the products worth paying for,” he said.
Whether it can keep growing will depend on whether users find those products worth staying with after the changes.
Higher prices or less free access could prompt them to leave, although Wijngaarde said the effects need to be assessed product by product.
The major staff reductions do not necessarily mean the products will stop improving, according to him. The measures to watch, he said, are “product quality, useful features and retention, not just headcount or margins”.