Who Is Bending Spoons, and Why Does It Keep Buying Everything?

I came across a post about Harvest, the time tracking tool, and ended up down a rabbit hole. Harvest was bought by Bending Spoons in 2025, and this year a lot of its customers were talking about a big change to its pricing.

That name kept coming up everywhere else too. Meetup, which I use to find events in Warsaw, belongs to Bending Spoons. So does Eventbrite. I pull events from both of them for wyd warsaw?, my little Warsaw events aggregator (it lives with my other side projects), so I wanted to know who now owns the pipes I depend on.

So here's what I found: who they are, what they own, how the playbook works, what they are doing with AI and why they came to Warsaw.

Who is Bending Spoons?

Bending Spoons is a software company headquartered in Milan. It started in Copenhagen in 2013, and the name comes from the spoon scene in The Matrix. The founders are Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli and Luca Querella, four Italian engineers who mostly studied at the University of Padua. Some sources, including TechCrunch, also list Tomasz Greber as a co-founder. Ferrari is the CEO and does almost all of the talking in public. Before Bending Spoons he worked at McKinsey.

Their first startup, Evertale, failed. When it was heading for bankruptcy, the investors let the team buy back their shares for a symbolic sum, and the roughly $40,000 left over became the seed money for Bending Spoons. They moved to Milan in 2014.

For years they built and bought consumer apps, like the video editor Splice and the AI photo enhancer Remini, and stayed fairly quiet. Then in January 2023 they bought Evernote, and the pace changed.

Some numbers from their 2026 IPO prospectus, as reported by Milano Finanza and TechCrunch:

Everything they own (that I could find)

The IPO prospectus says Bending Spoons has completed over 50 acquisitions. Here are the ones with recognisable names. Filter by year, sort by price, or hover over a deal for details.

Deal dates and prices come from Wikipedia's list of Bending Spoons acquisitions and the deal announcements for Brightcove, Komoot, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Tractive, Airtable and Miro.

A few of these got far less attention than Evernote or WeTransfer:

• Tractive, the Austrian pet tracker, is a hardware business with over €100 million in yearly revenue. Their prospectus flags its dependence on hardware devices as a risk, which is new territory for an app company.
• Komoot is a German route planning app for hiking and cycling, with a community of tens of millions of outdoor fans.
• Brightcove and Vimeo are both video hosting businesses, so Bending Spoons now owns two of the better-known names in business video.
• Airtable and Miro are a shift. They are newer, well-known collaboration tools used by large companies, bought within weeks of each other right after the IPO. That puts Bending Spoons inside a lot of enterprise workflows, alongside Harvest and Loomly.

The playbook: buy, rebuild, reprice, keep

Bending Spoons gets compared to private equity, but there's one big difference. Private equity buys a company to sell it later. Ferrari says Bending Spoons never sells. On Sequoia's podcast he put it this way: "We have never sold a material business. We don't intend to sell one in the future. So we buy to hold and operate forever."

From the reporting, the playbook tends to run in this order:

1. Buy a product with loyal users that has stopped growing or stopped making money. Bloomberg described their sweet spot as software firms "waning in popularity".
2. Run it with a much smaller team. Bending Spoons said AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo added 1,830 full-time employees, and it expects a few hundred to remain once the work is done.
3. Move the product onto shared in-house infrastructure. Their own engineers rewrite the code so every app runs on the same stack, with the same payments, analytics and testing tools.
4. Rework the pricing. Plans and tiers get restructured, and for some customers that means paying more.
5. Use the cash to buy the next one.

Eventbrite is going through steps two and three now, and Bending Spoons has already shipped product fixes like faster event creation and redesigned creator pages.

It works financially. Revenue per core employee went from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, which is a very high number for a software company. Harvest is a recent example of step four: in 2026 it moved from a flat price per seat to a base price plus usage charges, and some long-time customers ended up paying a lot more at renewal.

What's the end game?

Bending Spoons told IPO investors it has identified over 1,000 potential targets, representing about $400 billion in combined yearly revenue. That's the clearest statement of ambition I found. The plan is to keep buying established software at scale, run all of it on one platform, and compound.

The money to do that is now much easier to get:

• The IPO. Bending Spoons listed on Nasdaq on 1 July 2026 under the ticker BSP. It priced at $29 a share, raised about $1.68 billion and jumped nearly 40% on day one, closing at $40.50.
• Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett's company reportedly put $600 million in at the IPO, then another $330 million in October 2026, bringing it to about 4%. Bending Spoons said the money adds flexibility for more acquisitions.
• Debt. Over $4 billion of it, which means the acquired products have to keep producing cash to pay the interest.

The founders stay firmly in control. Since 2025 their shares carry five votes each, so even in a heavy dilution scenario they would keep roughly three quarters of the votes.

Airtable and Miro, both bought after the IPO, suggest the next phase is bigger business software. The older targets were consumer apps with loyal users. The newer ones are tools whole companies run on.

What are they doing with AI?

A lot, mostly internally.

According to the IPO prospectus, AI wrote or co-wrote over 90% of the code changes at Bending Spoons by early 2026, and about 70% were written entirely by AI. A year earlier that figure was around 10%. That is how a small team can rewrite dozens of acquired codebases onto one stack. They aren't hiring hundreds of engineers per acquisition, and AI is a big part of why.

Milano Finanza's breakdown of the filing names some of their in-house systems:

• Minerva, a model that predicts each user's lifetime value and decides how marketing budget gets spent
• Janus and Orion, testing tools used to run quick experiments, especially on payments and conversion
• Juno, their payments system
• Pico, Lumen and Abacus, data and infrastructure tools that acquired apps get migrated onto

So the AI strategy is less about launching a chatbot and more about running a software holding company with fewer people. AI makes migrating each new acquisition cheaper, and a pricing and marketing machine like Minerva gets better with every app's data added to it. On the consumer side they also own AI products like Remini, and the Warsaw office is hiring for AI research.

There's a risk in this for them too. Plenty of what they own, like note taking and file transfer, is the kind of task general AI assistants are starting to absorb. An analysis in TechNews pointed out that this could make it harder to keep users paying for Evernote or WeTransfer over time.

Why Warsaw?

In September 2026 Bending Spoons opened an office in central Warsaw, its fourth in Europe after Milan, London and Madrid. The company said it had received about 50,000 applications from Poland so far this year, more than double the 2025 total, and that more than half of its recent Polish hires were still studying when they applied.

It's hiring for software engineering, AI research, product and growth, data and design. New hires spend their first few months in Milan, with relocation, travel and up to four months of temporary housing covered.

Warsaw makes sense for them. Bending Spoons hires very few people (286 out of about 800,000 applicants in 2025), so opening an office where applications are already pouring in is the logical next step. I wrote about the local AI scene recently in my notes from Poland's first AI Safety Day.

So, are they good?

It depends on who you are.

• As a business, it's one of the most successful software companies Europe has produced. The growth is fast and the margins are high.
• As an employee of a company they buy, expect big changes. Teams usually get much smaller after a deal.
• As a customer, it depends on the product. Meetup and Eventbrite look the same so far, and Bending Spoons does ship fixes. If you rely on one of their tools, it's worth checking your plan when it renews.

For more on how I think about tools, pricing and go-to-market, see my GTM notes for 2026 and my piece on the AI talent wars.

What happens to Miro and Airtable next will show whether the same playbook works on big enterprise software.

Cover photo by Israel Andrade on Unsplash