● Digital Scrapheap Billionaire
Bending Spoons, Which Swallowed Evernote and Airtable, the Real Reason the “Digital Junk Shop” Became a 41 Trillion Won Company
After Airtable’s enterprise value plunged 81% from its peak, the buyer was neither Big Tech nor a famous private equity fund.
The protagonist is Bending Spoons, an Italian technology company that has aggressively acquired “once-hot software” such as Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and AOL.
The core point of this company is not simple mergers and acquisitions, but a method of buying cheap enterprise software whose growth expectations have faded and turning it into subscription-economy-based cash flow.
In this article, let’s take a single look at how Bending Spoons makes money, why the Airtable acquisition matters, and what this model means from the perspective of the global economic outlook and AI trends.
1. News key takeaway: Why did Airtable get 81% cheaper
Airtable is a leading no-code enterprise software that lets users organize data like Excel while building databases and business apps without coding.
During the pandemic, the expansion of remote work and the SaaS investment boom pushed Airtable’s valuation sharply higher.
In December 2021, Airtable’s enterprise value reached $11.7 billion, or about 16.78 trillion won.
But the recent acquisition price fell to $1.285 billion, or about 1.84 trillion won.
That represents a decline of about 81% from the peak.
There are three major reasons for this collapse in valuation.
- After the pandemic, expectations for high growth in software companies cooled.
- Rising interest rates and weakening investor sentiment lowered growth-stock valuations.
- As AI coding tools spread, the no-code approach that had been Airtable’s core strength began to lose its differentiation.
In the past, the ability to “build apps without developers” was a huge competitive advantage.
But now AI writes code and even helps automate work.
In other words, the issue with Airtable is not that the company failed, but that the market no longer gives Airtable the same high growth premium it once did.
2. What kind of company is Bending Spoons
Bending Spoons is a technology company headquartered in Milan, Italy.
The company name may be unfamiliar, but the services it has bought are quite familiar.
- Note app Evernote
- Video platform Vimeo
- Large file transfer service WeTransfer
- Community platform Meetup
- Event ticketing platform Eventbrite
- AOL, a symbol of the early internet era
- And Airtable, its recent acquisition target
The common thread among these services is clear.
They once represented the market, but now their golden age has passed and growth has slowed.
That is why Bending Spoons has earned nicknames such as “digital junk shop” and “the company rummaging through the graveyard of software.”
But if you stop at that nickname, you miss the core point.
What Bending Spoons actually buys is not failed companies, but companies whose growth expectations have fallen while customers and recurring revenue remain.
3. What the founder realized: It is better to buy existing customers than create new ones
Luca Ferrari, co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, was originally a tech founder.
His first startup was an app that analyzed photos and records stored on smartphones and automatically wrote a diary.
He succeeded in raising investment, but failed to attract enough users.
Through that experience, he realized one thing.
Building a good product does not automatically bring customers.
So for his second startup, he changed direction completely.
Instead of making a new service and waiting for customers to arrive, he decided to buy services that already had customers.
Bending Spoons was founded in 2013 with the roughly $40,000 left after winding down his first startup.
The first acquisition target was a small iPhone keyboard customization app in 2014.
The acquisition price was only about $10,000.
The company that started by acquiring that tiny app has now reached the stage of acquiring major enterprise software like Airtable.
4. The formula behind how Bending Spoons makes money
At first glance, Bending Spoons’ revenue formula is simple.
- Buy software whose growth has slowed at a low price.
- Overhaul the organization, technology, product, and pricing policy immediately after acquisition.
- Reduce costs and raise subscription fees to improve profitability.
- Hold the company for the long term rather than reselling it quickly.
- Use the resulting cash flow and external capital to acquire the next company.
In short, it is a “buy, fix, hold, and buy again” approach.
This model is completely different from the usual startup growth playbook.
Startups typically build a new product, burn marketing dollars to attract users, and aim for rapid revenue growth.
Bending Spoons, by contrast, buys services that already have customers and changes the cost structure and pricing structure.
In this process, the most important asset is not the technology itself but the customer base and recurring revenue.
5. The conditions Bending Spoons likes in an acquisition target
Bending Spoons does not buy just any software.
The company has clear criteria for preferred acquisition targets.
- The brand is already well known.
- A meaningful base of existing users remains.
- There is recurring revenue such as subscription fees or commissions.
- Growth expectations have fallen and the company is trading at a deep discount.
- The organization is bloated or the technology is outdated, leaving room to cut costs.
- Data, records, and workflows have accumulated, making it hard for users to leave.
By this standard, Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and Airtable are all classic Bending Spoons-style acquisition targets.
At the time of acquisition, Evernote had about $100 million in recurring revenue and millions of paying customers.
Before its acquisition, Vimeo had 1.28 million paid subscriptions and annual revenue of about $417 million.
Eventbrite recorded annual revenue of about $292 million through ticketing commissions.
Airtable also has more than 500,000 organizations using it, and about 80% of Fortune 100 companies are known to be customers.
Its annual recurring revenue is about $480 million, or roughly 686 billion won.
In other words, what Bending Spoons buys is not a dead app.
It buys a company whose market expectations have cooled but whose customers are still paying.
6. The first thing it does after an acquisition: downsizing and integrating the operating system
Bending Spoons does not leave the acquired company entirely in the hands of the existing management.
It carries out aggressive restructuring immediately after the acquisition.
It then redesigns old servers, software architecture, user interfaces, and core features.
The important point here is that it does not run each company separately.
It connects development, marketing, payments, pricing experiments, data analysis, and customer support to a common platform built by Bending Spoons.
In simple terms, it buys multiple companies but does not leave each one as an independent island; instead, it places them on top of one massive software operating system.
This makes it possible to reuse features and technology developed for one service in other services as well.
From the AI trend perspective, Bending Spoons’ competitiveness is less about simply operating apps and more about automated software restructuring capabilities.
7. The Evernote case: users were angry, but the company made more money
The best example of the Bending Spoons approach is Evernote.
Evernote was once synonymous with note-taking apps, but at the time of acquisition its app speed and stability were deteriorating because of an old monolithic system and massive legacy code.
Compared with newer collaboration tools like Notion, its competitiveness had weakened.
After acquiring Evernote, Bending Spoons cut most of the workforce.
At the same time, it improved app speed and stability and increased product updates.
It also used AI to automatically analyze customer support inquiries, speeding up error resolution.
As a result, IT infrastructure costs as a share of revenue fell 47% in 2025 compared with 2022.
It cut costs while raising prices significantly.
In the U.S., the annual personal plan before acquisition cost $69.99.
In 2023, it rose to $129.99, and after plan restructuring, products priced as high as $249.99 appeared.
It also put strong pressure on free users.
Before the acquisition, free users could create notes almost without limit, but afterward the number was capped at 50.
At the same time, the number of connected devices was reduced from two to one.
In effect, free users were told: stop using it or pay up.
Of course, user frustration increased.
But the numbers were on Bending Spoons’ side.
In 2025, 51% of new paid subscriptions came from existing customers who had hit usage limits.
Average revenue per user also rose 2.5 times in 2025 compared with 2022.
Customers who had accumulated thousands of notes over more than a decade complained, but they could not easily leave.
That reveals the essence of the Bending Spoons model.
The company monetizes customers’ switching costs rather than maximizing customer satisfaction.
8. Restructuring repeated across other acquired companies
Evernote is not a special case.
After WeTransfer was acquired, about 75% of employees left the company.
At Komoot, the workforce was reportedly cut by as much as 85%.
The workforce brought in through AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo acquisitions totaled about 1,830 people.
Bending Spoons expected that by the end of 2026, when the business restructuring is complete, only a few hundred of them would remain.
This approach is extremely ruthless.
It sharply reduces existing staff, integrates operations into a common platform, and then pushes price increases and paid conversion.
For consumers, it can be inconvenient and sometimes unpleasant.
But for investors, it is a model where cost cutting and cash flow improvement show up very quickly.
9. Bending Spoons’ growth numbers: why Nasdaq got excited
Through more than 50 acquisitions, Bending Spoons has grown into a technology company that oversees dozens of software businesses.
The company’s revenue surged from $387 million in 2023 to $1.31 billion in 2025.
As of March 2026, its total monthly users exceeded 500 million.
It has more than 9 million paying customers each month.
In the first quarter of 2026, 84% of revenue came from subscriptions.
In July 2026, it successfully listed on Nasdaq in the U.S., and its enterprise value was estimated at about 41 trillion won.
What investors valued highly was not the growth of individual services like Evernote or Vimeo.
They paid a premium for Bending Spoons’ ability to buy old software and turn it into cash-generating assets.
At this point, Bending Spoons looks less like a simple app company and more like a listed tech private equity firm that repeatedly acquires software companies.
10. Sustainability analysis: It works well, but the risks are growing too
The fact that the Bending Spoons model has worked so far is clear from the numbers.
In the first quarter of 2026, 48% of subscription revenue came from customers who had been subscribed for more than five years.
The average customer retention period was about eight years.
Operating cash flow rose from $59 million in 2023 to $205 million in 2024 and $291 million in 2025.
The basic formula of buying old services and turning them into cash cows is clearly working.
But when you look more closely at the company as a whole, there are concerns.
Revenue in 2025 increased 95% year over year.
However, organic growth excluding acquisition effects was only 13%.
In other words, most of the growth came from newly acquired companies rather than from the growth of the existing business itself.
Debt is also a burden.
In 2025, operating cash flow was $291 million, but money used for acquisitions and other transactions was $1.852 billion.
The shortfall was filled with loans and investment capital.
As of the end of March 2026, total debt stood at about $4.36 billion.
This structure is inevitably highly dependent on interest-rate conditions and capital-market sentiment in the global economic outlook.
When rates are low and investors are willing to believe growth stories, acquisition financing is easier to raise.
But when rates are high and credit markets tighten, the burden can rise sharply even for the same model.
11. Why the Airtable acquisition is the real test
Airtable has many of the qualities Bending Spoons likes.
It has a strong brand, large enterprise customers, and substantial annual recurring revenue.
But Airtable is different from Evernote or WeTransfer.
Airtable is not a simple consumer app; it is enterprise software that manages corporate data and core workflows.
Enterprise customers may be less sensitive to price increases than individual users.
However, they are much more sensitive to security, stability, customer support, and service continuity.
If Bending Spoons cuts staff and support functions too aggressively using its usual formula, problems could arise.
If service outages, security issues, or lower customer support quality occur, enterprise customers can quickly consider alternatives.
On the other hand, if Bending Spoons improves operational efficiency while maintaining Airtable’s growth potential, its business model will gain another layer of credibility.
That is why Airtable is both the best acquisition target and the toughest test.
12. What really changes from the AI trend perspective
In this case, it is not enough to view AI merely as a factor that has weakened Airtable’s no-code competitiveness.
AI is changing both sides of the Bending Spoons model at the same time.
First, AI coding tools are lowering the premium on no-code software.
In the past, being able to build business apps without developers was a major advantage.
Now, if you enter requirements in natural language, AI suggests code, database structure, and even automation flows.
This change lowers growth expectations for no-code platforms like Airtable.
Second, AI allows Bending Spoons to operate acquired companies with fewer employees.
By automating customer inquiry analysis, bug classification, code refactoring, marketing experiments, pricing tests, and data analysis with AI, it can significantly reduce operating costs.
In the end, AI both lowers the valuation of existing software on one side and improves the profitability of the company that buys that software on the other.
That is the most important AI trend point in this acquisition.
13. The most important thing other news stories often miss
Most news stories describe Bending Spoons as “a company that buys failing apps.”
But the more important essence is elsewhere.
Bending Spoons is not buying software growth potential; it is buying user stickiness.
Evernote users cannot easily leave because of notes accumulated over years.
Airtable customers cannot easily switch because their work data and automation processes are tied in.
Vimeo and Eventbrite also have accumulated content, payments, customer data, and event operations workflows.
Bending Spoons monetizes those switching costs through price increases and paid conversion.
Seen from this angle, the company is not buying software; it is buying customer inertia and data lock-in.
And AI makes this strategy even stronger.
By using AI, it can operate more services with fewer employees and analyze user data more precisely to determine where price increases will cause little churn.
In the future, when companies choose SaaS, they should not look only at features.
They also need to consider who might acquire the company, how much the pricing policy might change, and how easy data migration is.
This is likely to become an increasingly important risk in enterprise software purchasing strategy.
14. Checkpoints for investors and enterprise customers
From an investor’s perspective, Bending Spoons has a very attractive story.
That is because it buys undervalued SaaS assets, reduces costs, expands subscription revenue, and improves cash flow.
However, three risks must be watched carefully.
- Is organic growth excluding acquisition effects sufficiently strong
- Is debt increasing faster than cash flow is improving
- Can it prevent customer churn even after acquiring large enterprise software
For enterprise customers, the issues are more practical.
The SaaS you use could suddenly become more expensive after an acquisition.
Free features could become paid features.
Service quality could decline if customer support staffing is reduced.
And because data migration is costly, you may have no choice but to keep using it despite the pain.
Therefore, when signing SaaS contracts in the future, companies should review data backups, migration feasibility, price increase clauses, SLAs, and the scope of security responsibility much more carefully.
15. Conclusion: Bending Spoons is not a “junk shop” but a SaaS restructuring factory
Bending Spoons’ nickname is the digital junk shop.
But in reality, it is closer to a SaaS restructuring factory that buys old software and extracts cash flow from it.
The company avoids the difficulty of creating new customers from scratch and acquires services that already have customer bases.
Then it trims the organization, integrates technology, raises prices, and maximizes subscription revenue.
This model has been successful so far.
However, it still needs to be proven whether the same approach will work for software deeply embedded in core enterprise operations, like Airtable.
If it succeeds, Bending Spoons could establish itself as a new M&A model in the software industry.
On the other hand, if enterprise customer churn increases, the limits of this model will become clear as well.
This Airtable acquisition is not just another corporate sale story.
It is an important case showing how software value is being revalued in the AI era, how the subscription economy is being monetized, and how Nasdaq-listed companies build growth narratives.
< Summary >
Bending Spoons is a company that acquires software like Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, AOL, and Airtable, where growth expectations have faded but customers and recurring revenue remain.
The core strategy is to buy cheaply, reduce headcount, integrate technology, raise prices, and improve cash flow.
In the Evernote case, user dissatisfaction grew because of price increases and restrictions on free features, but paid conversions and ARPU rose sharply.
However, most of Bending Spoons’ growth comes from acquisitions rather than internal growth, and debt burden is also increasing.
Airtable is a crucial test case because it is a service tied to core enterprise operations and data, making it important to see whether the existing playbook will work.
The most important essence is that Bending Spoons is not buying software; it is monetizing customers’ switching costs and data lock-in.
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*Source: [ 티타임즈TV ]
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