Vimeo was hit by a massive round of layoffs this past week. Staffers posting on various social media sites reported that the layoffs impacted most of the company, including the entire video team. Vimeo is a video-hosting platform, so that development is particularly significant.
These layoffs are the latest restructuring by Bending Spoons, the Milan-based tech conglomerate that acquired Vimeo for $1.38 billion in an all-cash deal that closed in the latter half of 2025. While Bending Spoons may be unknown to many, it has quietly become one of the tech industry’s most prolific buyers, now owning Meetup, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and many others.
So what exactly is Bending Spoons? Despite its catchy name, the 12-year-old company has stayed remarkably under the radar, typically making headlines only when it adds another recognizable brand to its portfolio or when it restructures these companies through significant layoffs.
The company’s playbook has become clear: acquire underperforming but popular tech brands, then transform them to serve millions of users more efficiently through controversial changes to beloved products and substantial workforce reductions. It followed this pattern with Evernote and WeTransfer, and is now repeating it with Vimeo.
Despite remaining largely unknown to the public, Bending Spoons’ roster of products has served more than a billion people, with over 300 million monthly active users and 10 million paying customers.
Despite often being described as a private equity firm, Bending Spoons describes itself more specifically as a company that acquires and transforms digital businesses. Having grown to a headcount of 400 to 500 employees, its main focus is on making improvements to products and services that others have created.
However, it didn’t start that way. Bending Spoons was born out of the remains of Evertale, a Copenhagen-based startup that participated in Disrupt SF 2011’s Startup Alley and raised seed funding for its photo-sharing app, Wink. Evertale failed not long after, and investors were able to exit, but its founders and a couple of employees kept working together, initially on in-house apps. Soon enough, the team made its first acquisition, followed by many others.
In 2020, Bending Spoons made an exception when it created and donated Immuni, Italy’s official COVID-19 contact-tracing app. But other than that, it has mostly been honing a formula: Bending Spoons identifies a popular product it thinks it can improve inside and out, and buys it from owners who have reached their limits.
After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech, monetization strategy, and team organization, including headcount.
While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: It aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business. Its acquisition targets so far haven’t necessarily been failing businesses, but they’ve tended to be stagnant, neglected, or had owners looking to exit.
While Bending Spoons acquired several companies between 2014 and 2021, including the AI-powered photo enhancer Remini, its most notable acquisitions happened more recently.
In 2022, it acquired Filmic, known for its popular video- and photo-editing apps, and laid off the entire staff in December 2023. In a deal also finalized in early 2023, Bending Spoons acquired Evernote. Layoffs followed the acquisition, as well as cuts to Evernote’s free offering.
The first half of 2024 was particularly active, with the acquisition of Meetup, app maker Mosaic Group, and Hopin’s StreamYard all happening within six months. In July 2024, it went on to acquire the publishing platform Issuu and the file transfer service WeTransfer, where it later cut staff and made changes to its free plan, introducing stricter limits.
In November 2024, Bending Spoons announced it would spend $233 million on an all-cash take-private deal to acquire video platform Brightcove. The acquisitions continued in 2025, including the route planner Komoot and management software maker Harvest. Bending Spoons also announced its intention to acquire Vimeo in a $1.38 billion all-cash deal, and soon after, to acquire AOL from Yahoo for an undisclosed amount.
The Vimeo acquisition closed in the latter half of 2025, and was followed by the massive layoffs that hit the company this month. In December 2025, Bending Spoons announced it would acquire yet another well-known brand: Eventbrite, for only some $500 million. However, Eventbrite stockholders have filed a lawsuit to upend the take-private deal.
Since October 2025, Bending Spoons has been one of Europe’s rare tech decacorns, valued at more than $10 billion. This comes on the heels of its latest funding round: $270 million from investors, plus a $440 million secondary share sale by existing shareholders. The company last raised at a $2.8 billion valuation in 2024, making its updated $11 billion valuation a significant step up for its four co-founders, who joined the billionaire ranks as a result.
Bending Spoons said it intends to continue pursuing new acquisitions that expand its portfolio of consumer and enterprise digital products, and it now has funding to afford more prominent targets going forward. Presumably to support its continued efforts, it also has openings across various roles.
Candidates aside, Bending Spoons is also interviewing banks. According to reports, the company is holding talks with several financial entities to launch an IPO on the NYSE. The CEO has stated that should it decide to go public, Bending Spoons would probably list in the U.S., where tech companies tend to achieve higher valuations.