“Don’t try to bend the spoon, it’s impossible.” Matrix, 1999. Today two bent spoons are intertwined in the logo of Bending Spoonsperhaps the first Big Tech that we are seeing born in Italy. Or at least the only one of which let’s hear about it. Even a lot. Communication is surgical. The interview with the CEO of Bending Spoons Luca Ferrari it seems like an obligatory passage in the world of podcasts, both Italian and foreign.
Search on Spotify. Let’s just consider the last months. The November 4th was a guest on Invest Like The Best, by Patrick O’Shaughnessy. The October 16th from Wilson, by Francesco Costa. The July 16th from Actually by Riccardo Haupt. Scrolling through the history the list continues. The genres are varied but very often they are podcast where we talk about investments.
Bending Spoons it is not listed on the stock exchange. His latest rating, however, was set at 11 billion dollars. Enough, as Milano Finanza certifies, to make its founders billionaires and several employees millionaires. At least those in possession of the shares. The story of Bending Spoons and its founders seems like one vertical climbing. Almost all in Italy where the scores for Innovation are not exactly at the top of the OECD rankings. But what’s the trick? How did Bending Spoons bend the spoon?
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This article was written by Valerio Berra And Elizabeth Red.
The foundation myth: the EverTale case
The founding myth of Bending Spoons is based on one classic scheme: every success story starts from a failure. In his podcasts Luca Ferrari always talks about the origins of his entrepreneurial story. Copenhagen, 2011. Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello and Matteo Danieli are three Italian students who are finishing a course in Denmark. They founded EverTale an AI-based startup. “Before everyone started talking about it,” as Luca Ferrari said in an interview with Patrick O’Shaughnessy last November.
At the heart of the project was an app capable of writing a personal diary starting from the information contained in our smartphone. The app raises one million euros in investments. The founders begin to work on it everyday. They make several attempts. They spin it off, change their strategy but in the end nothing: they close everything and find themselves alone 40,000 euros.
The traces left by EverTale in 2002
Think about an application of artificial intelligence in the 2011 And visionary. If we look carefully, however, we see that the EverTale project starts well before 2011. On WayBack Machine, the internet archive, we found traces of the site starting from 2002. The first saved version of EverTale.com doesn’t have much to do with AI: it’s a service that allows you to turn any story into an ebook.
It is unclear what happened to this project. In 2003 there were other rescues but it seems that the site was used as a portal for a kind of Booking.com dedicated to Spas. Then the saves disappear. We find them in 2011with the first EverTale homepages becoming a personal diary service.
Certain. Domains are not matter immutable. They can be bought, sold, used and thrown away. We don’t know who was behind that first version of EverTale. Just a curious fact. The EverTale logo when it was just an ebook app had the symbol of infinity. A symbol that later disappeared in the design of his diary version. We will find him again in 2013 another logo: that of Bending Spoons.
The Bending Spoons Method: Making Money with Venture Zombies
Buy – cut – develop – earn. In all the podcasts he has visited, Luca Ferrari always answers one question: what does Bending Spoons do? In fact the company has not developed a product but a method. Acquires tech companies that are stagnant, they don’t grow but they don’t collapse either. Cut i development costs. Translated: fire a large part of the employees. Develops the product: improves parts or inserts new ones. Earn money: often adjusting upwards costs for services.
Step 1: Choose
The first step is the acquisition. Every year Bending Spoons acquires a handful of companies. The selection process is long. They evaluate themselves thousands of options with market analysis and predictive models. You choose who to bet on. A proposal is made. Not too low, not too generous. At this point we proceed with the negotiated. The purchased companies have some things in common. They’re all in tech fieldthey have a loyal user base, they have stopped growing.
Andrew DumontCEO of Curious, defines them in an interview with TechCrunch “venture zombiesCurious is a company with a similar business model to Bending Spoons. Fabio Buttignon teaches Corporate Finance at the University of Padua and explained to Fanpage.it how one is identified good acquisition: “Bending Spoons tries to find solutions in the market that already have a utility, that have already been partially successful. They manage to exploit the potential much better than others.”
The list of acquisitions is very long. You can find it in more detail in the Technicismi newsletter by Riccardo Bassetto. The distance between the first and the last one. The first was an app to customize the iPhone keyboard. Cost: 10,000 euros. The last one was Eventbrite, paid approx 500 million dollars. In between historical brands such as Evernote, Vimeo or WeTransfer.
Step 2: Cut
January 2023acquisition of Evernote. Ars Technica reports that all US-based staff are being laid off. July 2024, acquisition WeTransfer. TechCrunch reports that Bending Spoons’ plan is to fire the 75% of employees. May 2025, acquisition of Komoot. Escape Collective reports that he was fired on80% of employees. The last case is that of Vimeo: Acquired by Bending Spoons in 2025 for $1.38 billion. In recent days i sector average reported that the company went through a round of layoffs. One employee commented on X: “Almost every person who works at Vimeo has been fired.” Of course, the goal is to reduce production costs but that’s not the only reason.
One of the pillars on which the Bending Spoons business model is based is personnel selection process. On Reddit, interviews held to work in the company are almost a literary genre. Getting in is very difficult. Also in the Invest Like The Best podcast Luca Ferrari explained that around 800,000 applications arrived in 2025 alone. Only 250 have passed. Bending Spoons’ goal is to be an attractive companycapable of gathering talent from all over the world. They also developed gods predictive models to evaluate from a CV what the candidate’s growth possibilities may be.
Just one example. A mid-level company like Evernote will be able to attract mid-level developers. Business at a standstill, only one product, little opportunity for growth. Bending Spoons offers the possibility of tear off a ticket to join a growing company that works on multiple services. As often happens in the tech world, they are also included in salary packages purchasing options for company shares.
Step 3: Earn money
At this point we arrive atlast step. The product passes into the hands of Bending Spoons engineers. It is fixed, old services are enhanced or new ones are created. SI go to the checkout. The costs for premium packages often increase. Sometimes, however, they limit themselves free services. A percentage of users moves away, those who remain agree to pay more. Bending Spoons doesn’t sell anything. It absorbs everything.
Where does Bending Spoons money come from?
The starting point of the whole process is acquisitions. Bending Spoons needs liquidity to incorporate new companies. To get it, work a lot on debt. Fabio Buttignon explains it again to Fanpage.it: “The business model integrates this ability to select market opportunities, then the ability to process and develop and exploit potential. They leverage a lot of debt, they use it for acquisitions.”
A note on ratings. In February 2025 Standard & Poor’s gave Bending Spoons a rating of B+. In their report they talk about a solid business model, with good growth prospects. We leave you the complete evaluation report. Yet they also highlight some risks:
“About 90% of Bending Spoons’ turnover is generated by subscriptionswhich offer greater stability and earnings visibility than competitors that rely primarily on Volatile advertising revenues. However, we believe its customer base is less loyal than that of software companies, with higher risks of churn and limited ability to increase prices”.
An impossible trick in Italy
What Bending Spoons has done in recent years is a unique in Italy. By size, by growth and also by the sector in which it established itself. Partly also because in Italy it was impossible to follow the same business model. We talked about it with Cristiano Cominottolawyer expert in labor law: “In Italy they couldn’t do it. In the United States there are very different labor laws and, moreover, they change from state to state.”
But not only that. Processes of this type are regulated in Italy also by trade unions: “In the United States, employment contracts usually provide for a principle of dismissal At Willaccording to the will of the employer. In Italy it is very different, if only because when we talk about large numbers the unions come into play: whoever buys a company usually has to present an industrial plan, which also takes into account employment levels”.
Where Bending Spoons wants to go
“The spoon doesn’t exist. Then you will realize that it is not the spoon that bends but it is you.” The Matrix clip from which Bending Spoons takes its name ends with a Neo a little perplexed who looks at the spoon and manages to bend it. We don’t know what the connection is between this scene and the goal of Luca Ferrari. But we can see some doors opening through the code.
One of the most talked about passages around Bending Spoons is the listing on the stock exchange. A leap that could take place as early as 2026. On November 13, in an interview with Reuters, Ferrari himself said that everything was ready: “I don’t know if we will be listed next year, but we are ready. Any year could be the right oneAnd not in Italy. Directly on Wall Street.
