# Every Bending Spoons acquisition follows the same playbook

> Bending Spoons has bought Evernote, WeTransfer, Komoot, Vimeo, Harvest, AOL, Eventbrite, Airtable and Miro since 2023, and the same four steps show up after every deal closes. This tracks what happened to each one, updated as new acquisitions land.

Clawnify Resources · https://www.clawnify.com/resources/bending-spoons-acquisitions · 2026-09-11

## Every company Bending Spoons has bought, and what changed after
Bending Spoons is a Milan company that buys other software companies. It doesn't build products from scratch, and it says surprisingly little about the ones it already owns. What it has instead is a pattern. Since 2023 it's acquired at least nine companies with real, recognisable brands, everything from a decade-old note-taking app to a whiteboard tool with a quarter of a million paying organisations, and almost every deal gets followed by the same handful of changes.

This page tracks what happened to each one. It's drawn from the people who worked there, used the product, or just watched the deal from outside. The numbers below are whatever circulated after each close, attributed to whoever said them. None of this is audited. That's flagged throughout, not glossed over.

CompanyAcquiredPrice paidWhat changedVerdictMiroSep 2026$1.355B cashDeal is one day oldToo fresh to judgeAirtableAug 2026$1.285BDeal is weeks oldToo fresh to judgeEventbriteMar 2026UndisclosedGrouped into a combined cut, belowToo early to scoreAOLJan 2026Undisclosed ($2.8B debt raised)Grouped into a combined cut, belowToo early to scoreHarvest2025UndisclosedLegacy renewals up 800 to 1,500 percent in 2026Steepest price shockVimeo, StreamYardFall 2025$1.38BMost of the company cut, incl. video engineeringHarshest complaintsKomootMar 2025~€300M~85% of ~150 staff cut, founders includedDeepest cut by shareWeTransferJul 2024Undisclosed~75% staff cut, free plan capped at 10/monthCofounder built a rivalMeetupJan 2024UndisclosedStarted charging to promote eventsUsers say it got worseEvernoteJan 2023Undisclosed129 laid off, Personal plan +86%, free capped at 50 notesUsers split down the middleEarlier deals sit in the same portfolio: the video app Splice, bought from GoPro back in 2018, plus Remini, Filmic Pro and Issuu. They're left off the table above because the sourced, specific detail on what happened to each of them just wasn't there to check.
## Why this suddenly matters: the Nasdaq IPO
Bending Spoons only became a public company this year. It listed on the Nasdaq in the summer of 2026 under the ticker BSP. Bloomberg put the raise at $1.68 billion, and the stock reportedly jumped around 40 percent on day one.

The IPO didn't slow the acquisitions down. If anything, it funded them. Airtable was described as the company's first acquisition after going public, closing roughly six weeks before the Miro deal was announced. Two large, recognisable software companies, bought back to back within two months of listing. That's a strong signal the public markets are pricing in the acquisition pace itself, not treating it as some side effect of the business.

One detail from the Miro announcement makes that reading hard to dismiss. Some of Miro's own shareholders chose to roll part of their payout, reported at $295 million, back into Bending Spoons stock instead of taking the cash. Selling shareholders betting on the buyer's next move isn't something that happens around a deal that looks like a one-off.
## The two newest deals: Airtable and Miro
Airtable, bought for roughly $1.285 billion in early August 2026, was the first acquisition to close after the IPO. Miro followed about six weeks later: $1.355 billion in cash, announced 10 September 2026, for a whiteboard tool reported to have more than 100 million users, 250,000 paying organisations and around $600 million in annual recurring revenue. One report on the deal put the total value, including debt, closer to $1.8 billion.

Neither deal has outcome data yet. There's no layoff announcement and no pricing change for either product, not at the time of writing, so the honest entry for both rows in the table above is simple: too early to say. What exists instead is prediction, from people who watched the earlier deals close. One person building a product that competes with Miro wrote that its four million paying users should expect fewer people answering support requests by spring, and a new price list within the year.

Gergely Orosz, the software engineer and technology writer who has followed several of these acquisitions closely, put it more bluntly. Selling to Bending Spoons, he wrote, is an admission of defeat and a wish for any kind of exit, made with the knowledge that most staff will be let go once the deal closes. He was talking about Airtable specifically, and he noted the company had raised $1.4 billion in venture funding beforehand, which is part of what makes the sale itself a signal.
## What happened to the earlier acquisitions
Evernote, bought January 2023

129 people were let go in February 2023, the month after the deal closed, according to figures that circulated among former staff and got repeated by several people commenting on the deal. In May, the Personal plan reportedly jumped from $69.99 to $129.99 a year, an 86 percent increase, and some customers later said they were quoted as much as $250. The free tier was capped at 50 notes that November.

The reviews since then genuinely split, and not in the way you'd expect. A user who's kept the same account for fifteen years, with ten thousand notes in it, wrote that the newer features felt like real innovation and thanked the company by name. A different customer, a subscriber for seventeen years, wrote that the same company had systematically destroyed everything the product used to be, and left. Federico Simionato, who leads product at Bending Spoons, shared a side-by-side comparison of the app in 2022 and 2026 with a two-word caption: trust the process. Gergely Orosz, who actually looked at the infrastructure, wrote that at the time of purchase Evernote's user data lived on 750 manually managed virtual machines running a decade-old version of Java, and that the new owner had it rebuilt in about six months.

WeTransfer, bought July 2024

About 75 percent of staff were cut within weeks of the deal, according to accounts from people tracking it, with the reduction announced by leadership that September. The free plan got capped at 10 transfers a month that December. One of WeTransfer's cofounders later started a competing file-transfer product. Several people read that as a direct response to what happened to the company he built, and it's hard to argue otherwise.

Meetup, bought January 2024

Meetup doesn't have hard headcount numbers attached to it in the sources checked here, but the complaints about the actual experience are specific. One returning user, visiting the site after a long gap, wrote that the company now owns it, that it's started trying to monetise the people who show up to events, and that the experience was worse than he remembered. A different commentator, comparing it to Evernote's turnaround, said Meetup seemed to be going the other way: losing ground to a newer competitor called Luma.

Komoot, bought March 2025

Komoot, a hiking and cycling route app, was bought for roughly €300 million. About 85 percent of a roughly 150-person team was gone by that September, founders included, according to accounts from people close to the team. Komoot produced the sharpest first-hand accounts of any deal on this page. Former staff described one last group ride together before everyone scattered, and at least one wrote, in comments that were widely shared, that the sale had destroyed a platform a lot of people genuinely loved.

Vimeo and StreamYard, closed fall 2025

The deal, reported at $1.38 billion, was followed by layoffs on 20 January 2026 that one person described as cutting most of the company, including the entire video engineering team. One former engineer put it bluntly: "killed by private equity in a technology company skin suit." Customers of Vimeo and its live-streaming product StreamYard describe a specific pattern. A loyal, paying user base, kept in place just long enough to raise the price on it.

Harvest, bought in 2025

Harvest, a time-tracking and invoicing tool, doesn't have a disclosed price in the sources checked here, but it produced the sharpest pricing complaint on this whole page. Multiple customers reported renewal quotes 800 to 1,500 percent above what they'd been paying, landing in 2026. More than one said they just left, and built their own internal replacement instead of paying it.

AOL and Eventbrite, bought January and March 2026

Neither has a disclosed purchase price in the sources checked here, beyond a reported $2.8 billion in debt raised to fund the AOL deal. But Bending Spoons's own IPO paperwork, filed in mid-2026 and reported on by TechCrunch, says something plainer than any outside estimate could: the AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo deals together brought in 1,830 employees, and the company expects only a few hundred of them to remain.
## The playbook, stated plainly
Gergely Orosz summarised the pattern back in April 2024, before most of the acquisitions on this page had even happened. Buy a well-known but struggling brand. Keep a skeleton team through the handover. Let the rest go once the handover is done. Then raise prices while running the business on a fraction of its old staff. Everything documented above follows that sequence closely enough that it reads less like a coincidence and more like a checklist.

Mark Ajzenstadt, who runs a firm that embeds AI engineers into private-equity-owned companies, went through the company's public statements and attached harder numbers to the same model. Roughly 620 people, all told, run the entire portfolio. Revenue per person in that core group reportedly went from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025. Deals get financed with cash and debt rather than by selling equity, and in more than a decade of acquiring companies, Bending Spoons has reportedly never sold one back. His read is blunt: the company doesn't buy to flip, it buys to own and to squeeze.

The startup co-founder Luke Mostert offered a more structural explanation for the same pattern. As venture-style growth multiples collapse into private-equity-style cash-flow multiples, he argued, venture investors stop being willing to put more money into a company that's stalled. That gap is exactly where a buyer like Bending Spoons steps in, stripping cost out of the business and running it for whatever cash it throws off.
## Is this actually an AI roll-up?
Bending Spoons describes itself as an AI-native company, and it's common to see it grouped with the newer wave of AI roll-ups: funds buying up fragmented, low-tech service businesses and using AI to automate the back office. We've written about that category separately, and the two aren't quite the same trade.

The AI roll-up model described there works on a business that doesn't already use software: a home services company, a bookkeeping practice, an HOA manager. The buyer's argument is that the owner never had the technology or the appetite to automate the back office, so buying the company is the only way to get permission to change how the work gets done.

Bending Spoons buys the opposite kind of target. Every company on this page was already a software product, already had paying customers, and in several cases already had a modern engineering team before the deal closed. There's no permission gap to buy. What Bending Spoons is actually doing, on the evidence collected here, is closer to a very old private-equity trade: cut cost, raise price, run lean, and use current AI tooling to make a small team's output look like a much bigger one. Calling it an AI roll-up isn't wrong, exactly. It describes the tool being used, not the trade being made.

If you were a customer of any of the companies on this page, or you're reading this because you're worried you might become one, here's the practical lesson. It isn't to go find a better rental. It's that the next acquisition always looks, from the outside, exactly like the last one did the week before it closed.