Bending Spoons started with $40,000 left over from a failed startup and paid $10,000 for its first acquisition. Thirteen years later it owned Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite. The Milan company bought apps that people still used and ran them lean. Many of those companies saw deep layoffs and higher prices after the deal. By March 2026 its products had more than 500 million monthly users and 9 million paying customers.

After Evertale Failed

Some of the founders first built Evertale, an app that used AI to write a diary for its users. It raised a million dollars and earned almost nothing. In 2013 they wound it down. With the $40,000 left, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella, and Tomasz Greber started Bending Spoons in Copenhagen, then moved to Milan. The bet was that buying proven apps beat inventing new ones. Revenue reached $1.31 billion in 2025, up from $387 million in 2023.

Still Buying After the IPO

Bending Spoons priced at $29 a share, above its range, on June 30, 2026. It began trading on the Nasdaq the next day under the ticker BSP and rose about 40 percent on its first day. It kept buying. Airtable joined in September 2026 and Miro in October. That same month Berkshire Hathaway agreed to buy $330 million of new shares at $33 each.

Cover: Spoon, Jacob Boelen, I. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a single silver spoon.