What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/05/what-is-bending-spoons-everything-to-know-about-aols-acquirer/

by jack1689 • 17 days ago

86 114 17 days ago

jack1689• 17 days ago

I was reading a bit about their story, it feels like they managed to succeed by turning overly funded (and by then devalued) software products and restructuring them for long term profitability as they are not bounded to the classic 10 year time horizon of private funds. Wondering if we will see more plays like this as alternatives to traditional private equity and as fallback option for VC backed companies that bursted.

tecleandor• 13 days ago

From the acquisitions I've followed, what they do is firing 80% of the staff the next week after the acquisition, raise prices, and put the app in maintenance mode. I don't know if they've done something more sensible elsewhere, but they mostly do wealth extraction.

sbarre2• 13 days ago

While I agree that their specific approach sucks, I do wish more companies would declare products as "done" and stop messing with the UI and changing features every quarter, and just go into a long-term stability mode.

mike_hearn• 13 days ago

They do claim to be shipping new features to their acquired apps. Look at their website. It's got lists of such things.

The steelman case for this is something like, mature apps that found product market fit are often over-staffed and doing a lot of duplicated work. You could get five of them together and consolidate their infrastructure/code to reduce costs, and have generalist devs who can work on any of those codebases. Then you need fewer people.

So this isn't an irrational thing to do. It's commonly done by firms like Google or Meta where they buy a small company and then rewrite it onto their own infrastructure to reduce costs. Sometimes the engineers are reallocated to other projects, or things drift and there are eventually layoffs. Google bought DoubleClick and then laid off 50% of the staff! Twitter didn't consolidate products but was clearly overstaffed, nobody imagines that Twitter was unique.

So the bull case for this is that it's finding efficiencies. The apps may not be the shiniest hottest things anymore, but they can still live on and be maintained if they're run more efficiently as a business. And yes this may involve layoffs or price rises, as often software startups hopelessly misprice their product and prefer to burn VC money than lose users or colleagues. Managers who aren't emotionally attached to the product or company can correct this, putting it on a long term stable path. That may suck for the user but probably sucks less than the company being under, or being acquihired and the product totally shut down.

ChrisArchitect• 17 days ago

Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446310

Weird Italian loveletter about the IPO:

Bending Spoons just went public: Italy won the World Cup

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773549

Some history from only the past year in discussions:

Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302

AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749161

Bending Spoons Acquires Eventbrite

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124673

Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699

achandra03• 13 days ago

Is it not just a private equity fund masquerading as a tech firm?

PatronBernard• 13 days ago

It is. They are also enshittifying Komoot and EventBrite. Also by default they acquire a company and fire all staff within the week. Fuck Bending Spoons.

jlarocco2• 13 days ago

I wish they'd buy Spotify...

Keep one SRE to keep the servers running, one guy to do security updates to the app, and the team that acquires rights to music.

chrisvenum• 13 days ago

Pre-bending spoons Komoot was a beautiful app and community. You could operate it one handed with your brightness turned all the way down and easily get the info you needed. Now when I pull it up mid ride to route home I have to click through multiple upgrade to premium pop ups with tiny exit crosses. All good things etc etc

yeeetz• 13 days ago

is firing staff after acquisition inherently bad if it's the same staff/management that led to the app being devalued and losing users in the first place though

jodacola• 13 days ago

Bingo.

My wife brought them to my attention recently because she heard about them from Scott Galloway, who was speaking highly of Bending Spoons on one of his podcasts. As she was explaining this to me, I said "It's just PE."

They must be doing some good PR/marketing, because, for some reason, "PE" isn't the first thing entering a lot of minds about Bending Spoons right now.

alephnerd2• 13 days ago

BendingSpoon isn't PE because they are not attempting a restructure to then exit out of the asset within a defined time period.

When BendingSpoon or IAC acquired an asset, it's meant to be held by them in order to augment their existing portfolio.

M&A isn't the hallmark of PE - restructuring an asset in order to exit out of it at a profit is.

The classic PE monetization strategy is to acquire an underperforming asset, restructure said asset, and then exit the asset at around 20% IRR.

BendingSpoons on the other hand is a holding company that is acquiring and consolidating stagnant but large SaaS platforms into a single mega-platform.

The economics are different as are the operational and organizational structures.

dbbk• 13 days ago

Not really. They dramatically overhaul the products. Bloated staff are cut, old tech-debt-saddled systems are thrown out and rewritten. In some cases they basically just keep the brand and the database and rebuild the product around that, in a smaller and leaner manner.

I actually think the model is interesting.

sbarre2• 13 days ago

Isn't a PE firm going public just an admission of failure, and an attempt to make their private investors whole on the public market's back?

alephnerd2• 13 days ago

BendingSpoons isn't a PE fund. It's just loose terminology that has become rife on HN like the misuse of "VCs".

biophysboy• 13 days ago

Isn't it just a different form of private capital designed for the later stage of a tech company? I'm not saying its good, but I am not remotely surprised by tech's transition from growth/disruption/hiring to cost-cutting/M&A.

JumpCrisscross4• 13 days ago

Is it not just a private equity fund

It’s executing a private equity (and conglomerate) strategy out of permanent capital. That makes it more similar to Berkshire Hathaway than a private equity fund. (It is also less levered than most private-equity funds, though more levered than most companies.)

ethagnawl• 13 days ago

Whatever they are, they let Evernote devolve into a buggy pile of crap -- especially on Android. I migrated to Joplin, stopped paying for my obscenely expensive plan ($$$ per year) and haven't looked back.

GGO• 13 days ago

That's exactly their business plan. So seems like they are executing on it very well.

Quiza12• 13 days ago

Same - what's funny is that if they'd lifted prices 20-30% I might have stayed, but they went with the big bang of 85%.

cs7024• 13 days ago

Bending Spoons is a company that acquires SaaS companies/products that are not growing or losing users but have a well-known brand and customers who stick around.

The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.

Rinse and repeat. The goal is to generate the highest possible rate of return on invested capital in a law-abiding manner.

Scoundreller• 13 days ago

I had a vendor acquired by one of these types of outfits.

I looked through their assets and it clicked: “this is where software goes to die”

mavelikara2• 13 days ago

this is where software goes to die

The ones that IBM passed up on, yes.

ulfw2• 13 days ago

That's a short term business model if I have ever seen one.

"customers who stick around." is anthesis to mid- to long-term customer loyalty when you do "jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible"

cs7024• 13 days ago

Think of it as a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments.

Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition.

Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.

Bratmon2• 13 days ago

You're thinking too narrowly. Buying a cow is a short term investment because cows don't live very long.

And yet dairy farms can last for centuries.

dehrmann2• 13 days ago

Consolidating stagnant or dying SaaS offerings makes sense, but it'd be nice if there were a version of this that's a better steward of the companies.

bdamm2• 13 days ago

If that was good business then presumably the brand could have done it at some point during their long slow decline?

cs7024• 13 days ago

Arguably, they're a better choice for customers than a shutdown.

I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.

dvh• 13 days ago

So like Delphi?

The_Blade3• 13 days ago

yes, they are trying to gouge me on Evernote that no longer works, that i tried to unsubscribe from

here is a solid article from this week's Economist (that mentions another real jewel of a company):

https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...

SyneRyder• 13 days ago

Similar story here. They took my ~$100/yr Harvest time-tracking Solo plan, increased the price by 2.5x for a more restricted plan than I had... or I could get back the plan I had for $20,000/year.

So I downloaded my data, and had Claude vibecode a fully-featured clone in a single evening. Even if I was paying Anthropic API rates, it cost me less than a single year of my Solo plan.

PacificSpecific• 13 days ago

I've moved to Joplin and am pretty happy with it. Was easy to self host on my WebDAV.

I believe it imports Evernote data too.

CharlesW• 13 days ago

Tip: It's straightforward to migrate from Evernote to Apple Notes. https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/migrate-from-evernote-to-ap...

apparent4• 13 days ago

cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.

Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time".

quickthrowman• 13 days ago

That’s what “cut costs” means for SaaS, firing people.

JumpCrisscross4• 13 days ago

Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time"

Not commenting on Bending Spoons. But in general, a company built to grow is overprovisioned for one being put into maintenance mode. If you're growing, sure, let the designers change the UI every release. If you're trying not to lose customers, don't do that. Which means you don't need a crack team of in-house designers.

rpdillon6• 13 days ago

And the article tries to spin this positively:

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, including pricing; 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.” It is building a live portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard.

That last line has me wondering who wrote this.

IncreasePosts• 13 days ago

Renowned author C. H. Atgpt

Grombobulous7• 13 days ago

I don’t feel like the article was sortballing the company. They brought up things like the WeTransfer founder criticizing Bending Spoons’ decisions.

As for my opinion on the company, I don’t really see anything particularly negative about it. I think the fact that they’ve never sold an acquired business is a rather admirable trait.

In a way, they’re doing something that may not have been possible without this style of intervention, which is to keep companies/products that would have otherwise disappeared viable.

For a company like Evernote it wouldn’t be better for their customers if the company liquidated. There are worse things that can happen to your service provider of choice than price increases or worse customer support.

everybodyknows• 12 days ago

building a live portfolio

The portfolio grows -- "live", and faster than each of the businesses within it shrink. As they all do, by Bending Spoons' strategic design.

danabrams• 13 days ago

There are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle and Bending Spoons's model is to maximize what they can get in the final stage of decline.

There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're a user of one of these services you might take it as a hint to find an alternative.

alexpotato• 13 days ago

There are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle

I usually say in interviews that my preferred time to join a company is at the end of stage 1 (start up) and the start of phase 2 (organizing).

Nothing makes me happier than to be told "Hey, we got this up and running and it's a mess. Now we need someone to turn this into a system that is easy to modify and maintain."

NuclearPM2• 13 days ago

“ There's nothing wrong with that”

Debatable

pigeons3• 13 days ago

Yeah, gotta call out the "There's nothing wrong with that".

cess11• 13 days ago

Is this practice good for the workers in the organisation?

lovich• 13 days ago

Can a business not just reach a steady state after maximizing its market?

john-h-k2• 13 days ago

The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.

If they are such stable long term SaaS businesses who aren’t losing customers, why are they selling to bending spoons?

pyrale• 13 days ago

because there's no joy in managing a declining company, especially when you made it grow in the past, and probably get enough money from the deal that you don't need to care anymore.

stock_toaster• 13 days ago

So like Broadcom?

pigeons3• 13 days ago

So like Computer Associates?

AdmiralAsshat• 13 days ago

Remarkably on-brand, named after the signature trick of a well-known charlatan.

jabiko• 13 days ago

I'm a bit salty due to what they've done to the Komoot team. Komoot was (and still is) a great app for planing your outdoor activities.

After acquiring Komoot, they fired everybody. Watching their goodbye video is a bit heartbreaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLJkK4Wn1HI

xacky• 13 days ago

AOL Time Warner was the peak of the original dot com bubble.

block_dagger2• 13 days ago

Whenever I see Vimeo in a headline, it reminds me of my lack of foresight. In college, the creator of Vimeo was in my friend group. I went to his on-campus apartment to pick him up for a party once. He showed me this "video sharing website" that he was working on. Its title was an anagram of "movie." This was in 1999. Digitized video was barely a thing. I looked at it, didn't understand how it would be useful, and assumed it was another one of his eccentric creative outlets that would go nowhere. A few years later, he was a multimillionaire and I was not.

ValentineC• 12 days ago

Its title was an anagram of "movie."

TIL! I always thought it was some creative play on "video".

block_dagger2• 12 days ago

It's both!

com2kid• 13 days ago

Very off topic - Just 2 days of for fun I tried to login to AOL.com with my username and PW from 1995. (Same username as on HN in fact)

It worked! That is one hell of a series of good DB migrations.

Sadly I was immediately forced to change my password. Still, 31 years is a good run for a password.

lain98• 13 days ago

Down 13% in the last 5 days.

khurs• 13 days ago

This is the Prospectus they used for the IPO which goes into all the details about them

https://bendingspoons.com/documents/financials/2026/Bending%...

bix6• 13 days ago

I don’t really get this model. Seems like a waste of money / time / energy.

Bratmon2• 13 days ago

They keep popular but unprofitable products that would otherwise be turned down alive.

There are Victorian-horror-esque costs to that, but it's still better that those projects be alive but enshittified than completely dead (If you disagree, you can just cancel your subscription, after all)

apparent4• 13 days ago

Are there any companies/products that got better after acquisition by these guys? I feel like the only times I've heard about them is when people are griping about how they're making stuff worse.

cryo32• 13 days ago

Bending Spoons are the miserable tossers who bought Meetup and somehow made it worse by monetising every move you make. And it was pretty bad to start with.

mghackerlady• 13 days ago

I wonder how different AOL is since last time I checked. A few years ago at least, it was basically just Yahoo with different branding

luisgvv• 13 days ago

What is Bending Sppons?

The company that made me unsubscribe from Evernote after 8 years because it got slow, buggy and skyrocketed their prices.

Good riddance, now I am using Obsidian + an LLM and works way better.

forsatellite• 13 days ago

Contrary opinion I guess but they've modernized the two services I use that they've acquired: Evernote and Harvest. I was already a paying multi-seat customer of both so maybe the worst price increases didn't happen to me (yet); I suspect Bending Spoons has a real animosity to free/near-free tiers. But I certainly might get bitten soon.

I use Evernote for paperless household management (shared travel itineraries, scans of paperwork, saved recipes, etc.) as well as my personal notes. It was under Bending Spoons that they finally landed multi-player realtime collaboration, which ended a decade of annoying sync conflicts and bugs, at least for me. Every month there are new little features like @mention to include a linked note, that bring more parity with platforms like Notion – the kind of core improvements the original owners had completely lost focus on. And they record a monthly video evangelizing the new features. Would something newer be better? Who knows but I'm happy not to switch, I have thousands of notes in there which I access from laptop, desktop, phone, and web. Bouncing from one platform to another is not my favorite way to spend time. I'm quite happy with how they've managed a mature platform.

Harvest also started adding new features for the first time in many years. Their customer support did turn into a baffling AI bot for a while but eventually a human replied and apologized. Harvest is also a mature platform that just needs to not self-destruct in order to serve my needs; but small new features have been welcome.

Both these platforms have something in common too: Good old fashioned REST API's. I like to scan directly to Evernote from my Brother MFC printer/scanner, no computer or phone needed. We log time into Harvest from a variety of other platforms and apps. I'm happy to have these workflows maintained. I might submit that this kind of specialized, deep-pocketed owner is the best-case scenario for long-term preservation of mature REST-based SaaS small businesses. Otherwise they get bought by Google, or dwindle when the founders move on?

crumpled• 13 days ago

I wonder if "loyal user base" just means people who feel locked in, or somehow don't know any better. I can't imagine another reason for the "loyalty".

Feels pretty exploitive.

dmacedo• 13 days ago

Well I want to launch Straightening Forks: the B-Corp that hires experienced developers, designers, and other digital folks and instead of buying dying digital estate to extract the remaining bone hurting juice from its user-base, it would instead: re-implement (fork, LOL) open alternatives seeking viable business models or just FOSS a working path, with minimal product features serving those core users and their needs, centralising the core cross-product services and cost optimising the backend plus realising what's the actual features users "need" vs. "want", and try to create sustainable products which instead of just extracting value try to provide value in this world.

Surely this isn't difficult???...

chewz• 12 days ago

There is a market niche for projects cementary. Many companies or funds tend to buy projects at peak valuations (or artificial valuations based on blown up projections).

Re-valuating these projects on the books would be an embarrassing to the board. Losing face, shareholders questions.

Selling these assets (possibly via asset swap) to specialized cementary fund where they can be disolved and disappear in the haze is a different, more honorable matter.

What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

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