Grow through acquisitions. The Bending Spoons strategy explained by its founder

Growth through acquisitions. Many, dozens in just a few years. Three in the first three months of 2024 alone. Often successful in the United States, a rarity for an Italian startup. Bending Spoons is a case in point. The Milanese company is now in the spotlight of the world press. 11 years have passed since its foundation.

Today it is a small software giant: 400 employees, revenues which in 2023 have risen to 392 million and which by the end of the year the company sees at 600. Almost double. The growth rate that a startup should have to scale its target market. Although it is rather difficult to define Bending Spoons well. It is among the leading developers of applications for Apple devices, where more than half of its revenues come from.

Brief history of Bending Spoons: from Copenhagen to the Immuni app

Founded in Copenhagen in 2013, moved shortly afterwards to Milan, over the years it has become one of the global leaders in app development and marketing. In Italy it is best known for having developed Immuni, the Covid-19 anti-contagion app created and donated to the government. Today it is in all respects one of the main European technology companies.

Bending Spoons is worth around 2.55 billion today. It is among the few Italian tech companies to have reached a valuation above one billion, a club whose members in Italy can be counted on the fingers of one hand. A unicorn, as these companies are called in the startup vocabulary.

Bending Spoons: 2.5 billion in value, 700 million in financing

It obtained financing for around 700 million. 200 million in capital increase, and just over 500 in debt. Money used to grow. And growth for Luca Ferrari, born in 1985, from Verona, founder and CEO of the company, also means acquiring other companies. Bringing new tools and skills to the headquarters in the Garibaldi area. “We are a technology company that acquires, develops and grows digital products thanks to a powerful proprietary platform,” he explains to La Stampa.

The latest acquisition is video streaming platform StreamYard. The figure was not revealed. Just as those of the other dozens of acquisitions made over the years have not been revealed. Shortly before, they had completed the acquisition of Evernote, an app for organizing one’s work. Before that, Meetup (work organization) and Mosaic (app developer). The company was close to purchasing the popular video app Vimeo, but the deal fell through.

Growing through acquisitions: the Bending Spoons case

“Although mobile apps are an important component of our portfolio, we manage products of various kinds. For example, Evernonte is a sophisticated productivity suite used mainly on laptops. And the same goes for StreamYard, which is one of the most advanced live-streaming video recording tools.” But what are all these acquisitions for? “We acquire products that we believe have a lot of untapped potential, and through our platform, we seek to fully realize this potential. We then reinvest the proceeds in strengthening the platform and making even larger and more stimulating acquisitions,” explains the manager, who founded the company with Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella and Tomas Greber. Expressing that untapped potential is key to operations. The value generated will lead to others.

The recipe is the same: grow through acquisitions and value creation. “It is our main growth engine. We don’t have strong preferences regarding the sector, as long as they are digital products,” he adds. These were not always painless acquisitions. After securing Evernote, which had failed to become profitable for years, Bending Spoons fired almost all of its 250 employees in the US and Chile, moving its operations to Europe. Where, however, Bending Spoons continues to hire. Also in Italy: “We are looking for many different profiles, but mainly computer engineers, artificial intelligence researchers, data analysts and scientists and product designers,” explains Ferrari.

Artificial intelligence and numbers

AI has also become a focus for Bending Spoons: “It permeates many of our activities, both behind the scenes and in the products we make available to our users. We have developed powerful automations that make our processes more scalable and efficient. And Remini – a photo modifier with AI, developed by the company – is the second most used generative artificial intelligence product in the world, behind ChatGpt”. 90 million unique users per month.

Growing numbers, says the company. And numbers are what the digital market is most interested in. Bending Spoons is among the very few Italian companies that can boast the growth that a startup should have. The numbers that would lead it to international consecration, or to listing on the stock exchange. No plans at the moment. In the future, who knows.