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.
I actually think the model is interesting.
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.
Which isn't exactly what they seem to be doing but also isn't that far off.
You don't sell a company if you don't believe its future can be better with you in command (most of the time)
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.
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.
After acquiring Komoot, they fired everybody. Watching their goodbye video is a bit heartbreaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLJkK4Wn1HI
https://bendingspoons.com/documents/financials/2026/Bending%...
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.
That said, tangentially, I do wish game companies would let games live on.
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
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)
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.
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...
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.
So if anybody is reading this? They absolutely will gouge you. All the stories you've read are all true. Take some advice and get out while you can.
Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time".
I looked through their assets and it clicked: “this is where software goes to die”
I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.
"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"
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.
Most things with royalties (oil fields, songs) work like this.
And yet dairy farms can last for centuries.