Vimeo, WeTransfer, and Filmic Owner Bending Spoons is Going Public

Milan-based app studio Bending Spoons has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States with a potential valuation of $20 billion.

Bending Spoons has built a portfolio of brands and services through aggressive acquisitions over the last several years. As TechCrunch reports, it has bought over 50 companies, including AOL, Filmic Pro, Eventbrite, Vimeo, Komoot, WeTransfer, Evernote, and Brightcove. Through those purchases, the company says it has over 500 million monthly active users with nine million paying customers.

Photographers will most likely know Bending Spoons as the company that fired all of Filmic Pro’s team and did the same at Vimeo and WeTransfer. In the case of WeTransfer, Bending Spoons held on to about 25% of the company’s workforce for a bit longer than September 2024, but PetaPixel can confirm that at least a majority of those people did eventually lose their jobs in 2025.

That is Bending Spoons’ modus operandi, though. Every time Bending Spoons would buy a company, it would shortly thereafter move all management and day-to-day operations of that company internally and lay off the original staff. The company positions this strategy as one where it buys a business that is not in a great position, “trims the teams,” as TechCrunch says, and then “pushes it to profitability.”

Looking at Filmic Pro, however, it doesn’t look as though that approach is always taken, as the firing of the entire team, including its founders, felt like a blindside at the time. Filmic Pro has since fallen off steeply in use as Blackmagic, Apple, Moment, and others have created far superior apps in both cost and functionality.

Nic Taylor, Head of Product and Growth at Livid, was once part of the Streamyard team when they were acquired by BendingSpoons. Similar to the stories at WeTransfer, Vimeo, and Filmic, Bending Spoons fired a majority of the staff soon after the acquisition.

“Things move quickly. They get their own people into all the teams as fast as possible. Doing as many workshops as possible. This is so they can reduce cost by firing as many staff as possible straight away. Everyone is replaced with very junior staff, with very little context as to how to run the business [which] often leads to outages,” Taylor tells PetaPixel.

“Once they achieve a minimum level of confidence with the intended price rise testing they’ll roll it out fully. Initially this shows a big increase in profits, before the chargebacks hit, after which the aftermath, if they’ve calculated correctly, usually leaves them with a tidy profit still. This is the part that has been different with Vimeo and it seems Eventbrite and AOL too. They’re doing a more gradual roll out of the price rise so far. Testing it for way longer than they usually would,” Taylor continues.

“They focus on shipping high impact/low effort work. They want to show their users that they can address problems quickly. Give the impression that they care and that things are improving rapidly. This is evident from pop-ups when logging in showing how many bugs they’ve fixed and regular updates on Reddit. They need users to feel like the value of their subscription is going up,” he adds. “They’ll survey customers. All looks good on paper, but it’s double edged – you’ll get some freebie features, but really they want to ensure they know what they can charge for. They’ll start testing price/feature combos pretty aggressively. We’ve seen that some users coming up for renewal have been forced into a new selection of plans. They state they have a really cheap plan available, however it’s stripped of features they know the majority of users need.”

“We see a vast opportunity ahead. We’ve identified more than 1,000 digital businesses (both private and public) that ​could be attractive acquisition targets in the future,” Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari, pictured above, writes in a letter attached ​to the IPO prospectus, Reuters reports.

Reuters also reports that Bending Spoons reported a net income of $27.5 million on revenue of $601 million for the first three months of 2026, compared to a net ​loss of $112.2 million on revenue of $259 million a year earlier.

In the IPO filing, Bending Spoons says that it ended the year with $1.31 billion in revenue. That aforementioned $601 million in revenue TechCrunch notes is a 132% year-on-year jump.

Taylor believes that as Bending Spoons ramps up with its IPO, it will do everything it can to make its business look even more profitable.

“They’re likely planning for when they can announce big profit increases in the businesses they’ve acquired. They’re going to need to show maintained momentum after the IPO so having Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite lined up for big profit increases could be a good strategy for them,” he says.

Bending Spoons was valued at $11 billion during a funding round in October, but now the IPO values the company at $20 billion.

“Current shareholders are likely in a great position. Their headlines look good right now. They’ve made some mistakes in the past with their acquisition execution, but usually learn pretty quick. They had to back out a ToS update at WeTransfer which would have allowed AI to train on all files on the platform, which they’ve been attempting to assure Vimeo users won’t happen again. The playbook, though, is creating a lot of casualties. It motivates people to be the anti-spoons, where a reasonable price can be charged for a good service. Every platform they acquire is maintained just enough to keep the revenue flowing. They’re not innovators, they’re private equity with a motivated tech team.”

Image credits: Bending Spoons