How an Italian tech giant builds value by acquiring and restructuring legacy digital brands
In short: Bending Spoons is not your typical software developer. Founded in 2013, this Milan-based conglomerate acquires established digital products, from Evernote to AOL, and aggressively restructures them. By leveraging artificial intelligence and significant workforce reductions, they aim to turn legacy software into highly profitable assets, sparking both growth and controversy.
Bending Spoons began in 2013 with $40,000 in seed capital after founders Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, and Matteo Danieli saw their initial venture, Evertale, fail. Inspired by a scene from the film The Matrix, the company eventually moved to Milan in 2014. While it gained early public recognition for developing Italy’s official COVID-19 contact tracing app, Immuni, in 2020, its core business model has evolved into a high-stakes acquisition strategy. By 2026, the company had gone public on the Nasdaq, raising $1.68 billion in an IPO that valued the firm at approximately $20 billion.
The company’s strategy resembles private equity but with a twist: it retains the brands it acquires rather than flipping them. Bending Spoons targets products with existing market fit, then uses proprietary tools and AI to rewrite codebases and optimize operations. This process almost invariably involves deep cost-cutting, including significant layoffs at companies like Mosaic Group, Evernote, and WeTransfer. In 2025 alone, the company received 800,000 job applications while making only 286 hires, reflecting its lean operational philosophy.
This approach has drawn intense scrutiny, particularly regarding pricing. When Bending Spoons acquired the time-tracking service Harvest in 2025, it shifted from a flat fee to a usage-based model, leading to renewal cost increases for some users of up to 1500%. Bloomberg reported that one freelancer saw their annual subscription jump from $211 to over $2,500. Despite this, co-founder Matteo Danieli maintains that customer retention across their portfolio remains remarkably stable. The company continues to expand its reach, recently moving into sectors like pet-tech with the acquisition of Tractive and cloud collaboration through Airtable and Miro.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Bending Spoons
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