Bending Spoons: The Quiet Italian Company That’s Buying and Rebuilding the Internet
How a bootstrapped team built an $11B empire buying "dead" apps. Discover the operational playbook that unlocks 60% margins from neglected products.
I’ve been watching this company for years, and honestly, I still can’t quite believe what they’ve pulled off.
Four engineers from Milan, Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella, and Francesco Patarnello spent $10,000 on a niche keyboard personalization app.
Today, their company, Bending Spoons, is valued at $11 billion, has just closed a $710 million funding round (including $270 million in new capital and $440 million in secondary sales), and has purchased iconic internet brands like Evernote, Meetup, Brightcove, WeTransfer, Vimeo, and most recently, AOL.
All four cofounders are now billionaires.
This isn’t another hype-driven unicorn story. It’s something rarer: a genuinely profitable, engineering-first company that figured out how to buy neglected digital products, fix them properly, and make serious money doing it.
How It Actually Started
2013–2014. Four friends in their twenties, working from a tiny office in Milan. They’re exceptionally skilled, masters of mobile development and bold growth hacks that push every boundary.
They launch a few of their own apps, make decent money, but notice something interesting: there are thousands of apps making $1–10 million a year that are badly run, have outdated code, terrible UX, and owners who just want out.
So they start buying them. Cheap. The first one cost ten grand. They rewrite the code, fix the crashes, improve the onboarding, run proper growth experiments, and suddenly that sleepy little app is doing 3–5× more revenue.
They repeat it. Again. Again.
By 2018–2019 they’ve quietly built a portfolio that’s throwing off real cash flow, almost entirely bootstrapped.
That’s the part most people miss. This company was profitable from very early days. They didn’t need VC until 2021, and even then it was on their terms.
What They’re Doing Now (And Why It’s Working So Well)
Today the playbook is the same, just scaled up dramatically:
Find products with large, loyal user bases but stalled growth and technical debt.
Buy them (often cheap because public markets hate “no-growth” software stocks).
Trim anything that no longer contributes to growth, whether it’s underperforming roles, wasteful spending, or outdated processes.
Move everything to their internal platform.
Rebuild the core tech properly.
Add AI where it actually helps users.
Raise prices when the product finally doesn’t suck anymore.
Enjoy 40–60% EBITDA margins.
Evernote is the perfect example.
When they bought it in 2022, it was a mess. Sync was broken, apps were slow, half the features hadn’t been touched in years.
