Most people have never heard of Bending Spoons. But they’ve almost certainly used something it owns.

The Milan-based tech conglomerate went public on the Nasdaq this week, briefly hitting a market cap above $25 billion, according to TechCrunch. That’s more than double its previous private valuation of $11 billion — a signal that investors are genuinely buying what this company is selling. Its portfolio includes AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, Meetup, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, and Issuu, among others. As of March 2026, those products collectively served over 500 million monthly active users.

So how did a company most people can’t name end up owning this much of the internet?

From Failed Startup to Acquisition Machine

The origin story is a little unexpected. Bending Spoons grew out of the ashes of Evertale, a Copenhagen-based startup that pitched a photo-sharing app called Wink at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2011. The startup didn’t make it, but its founders kept working together — first building apps in-house, then making their first acquisition, then another, then many more.

For years the company stayed bootstrapped, operating well outside the normal venture capital orbit. Its strategy was straightforward in theory but hard to execute: find a popular product whose owners have hit a wall, buy it, and make it work better — through technology, AI, tighter monetization, and leaner operations.

The company did eventually raise outside equity, including rounds in 2022, 2024, and 2025. Pre-IPO backers included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, and a surprisingly starry roster of celebrities including Bradley Cooper, Andre Agassi, and The Weeknd, according to TechCrunch.

In 2025, the company reported $1.31 billion in revenue. The IPO valuation suggests investors expect that number to keep climbing.

The Playbook: Buy, Cut, Keep

What Bending Spoons actually does after an acquisition is where things get controversial.

It is not a passive owner. According to TechCrunch, after taking over a product the company typically reworks the user experience, overhauls the underlying tech, adjusts pricing, and reduces headcount. After acquiring Evernote in 2023, it laid off staff and cut back the free tier. After buying WeTransfer in 2024, it trimmed the team and tightened free plan limits — moves that prompted WeTransfer’s own co-founder to publicly criticize the company in December 2025 and announce he was building a competing product. When Bending Spoons acquired video app maker Filmic in 2022, it eventually laid off the entire staff.

The approach draws obvious comparisons to private equity. But Bending Spoons insists there’s a meaningful difference: it says it “aims to hold forever” and has never sold an acquired business. It’s building a living portfolio, not flipping assets.

Co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli told TechCrunch that the scrutiny the company faces is partly because some of these products — Evernote especially — were deeply loved by their users. He pushed back on the idea that the changes have driven people away, saying customer retention has been “remarkably stable.”

Not a Tech Graveyard — or So the Argument Goes

One of the persistent knocks on Bending Spoons is that it hoovers up dying internet brands and squeezes out whatever value remains. The people who sell to it disagree.

Joe Hyrkin, the entrepreneur who sold digital publishing platform Issuu to Bending Spoons in 2024, addressed the perception directly on LinkedIn after the IPO. According to TechCrunch, he argued that framing these as “old internet brands” misses the point entirely — what Bending Spoons is really buying is products with real, existing user behavior, which it then plugs into a centralized system covering product development, engineering, data, monetization, and AI.

With 500 million monthly active users and a market cap that just doubled at IPO, there’s at least a credible case that the formula is working.

The bigger question — one the IPO now forces into the open — is what this model means for the internet brands we actually use every day. When a platform you rely on gets acquired by Bending Spoons, expect change: higher prices, fewer freebies, smaller teams. Whether the product gets meaningfully better alongside those cuts is the bet the company keeps making, and the one investors just paid handsomely to back.