Bending Spoons: A Different Kind of Tech Company

Bending Spoons is a Milan-based technology company that has quietly become a powerhouse in consumer apps. Founded in 2013, it remains relatively under the radar compared to flashy Silicon Valley startups – yet it has built and scaled a portfolio of hugely successful apps like the AI photo enhancer Remini, the mobile video editor Splice, and even taken stewardship of veteran products like Evernote. Bending Spoons’ business strategy breaks the typical startup mold. It emphasizes disciplined, data-driven experimentation, a highly selective hiring and unique culture, robust internal tooling, and a focus on long-term, high-margin businesses over blitzscaled, hype-driven ventures. This essay explores how Bending Spoons differentiates itself and why its approach is emerging as a model for modern entrepreneurship.

Bootstrapped Growth and Long-Term Focus Over Hype

Unlike many tech startups that chase rapid user growth with heavy venture funding, Bending Spoons took a different path from the beginning. The company was profitable from day one, growing for almost a decade without major equity financing. In fact, Bending Spoons bootstrapped its operations by reinvesting revenues and even using debt financing (over $500M in loans) rather than relying on venture capital. It wasn’t until 2022 – nearly ten years after founding – that Bending Spoons raised its first significant equity round ($340M, even attracting Hollywood investor Ryan Reynolds). By then the company was already generating over $100M in annual revenue and had a sprawling user base of 500 million across its apps. This patient growth meant Bending Spoons never became dependent on VC cash burn; instead, it built a sustainable engine of profitability and reinvestment.

Crucially, Bending Spoons focuses on proven product-market fit rather than speculative ideas. CEO Luca Ferrari explains that after an initial failed startup attempt, the founders decided “to take a very different approach” – acquire digital products that have already proven a fit with their market, but have “substantial untapped potential,” then improve them. In practice, this means Bending Spoons looks for solid apps (often subscription-based utilities) that might be underperforming or stagnating under their current owners. The company steers away from fads – for example, Ferrari notes they avoid gaming entirely and are skeptical of chasing “ridiculously over-valued” AI startups Bending Spoons does leverage AI within its products (Remini being a prime example), but it sticks to realistic applications of AI that enhance user experience rather than buying into hype.

This strategy is sometimes described as “if Berkshire Hathaway and Google had a baby,” combining a capital allocator’s long-term investment mindset with a tech operator’s product focus. Indeed, Bending Spoons behaves more like a modern private equity player for apps than a typical startup. It seeks out acquisitions that have steady user bases and cash flow, then optimizes them for profitability. The company’s ambition, as Ferrari puts it, is to build one of the world’s most significant tech companies via this method. By 2024, investors valued Bending Spoons at about $2.6 billion, reflecting confidence in this unconventional model.

Data-Driven Experimentation and Internal Tools

A cornerstone of Bending Spoons’ success is its disciplined, data-driven approach to product development and growth. The company doesn’t rely on guesswork or gut feeling to find winning products – it relies on data. Bending Spoons runs a portfolio of over 20 popular apps and “focuses on delivering an excellent user experience with a data-driven approach,” according to a Google Cloud case study. In practice, this means two things: first, choosing what products to build or buy based on data, and second, continuously improving those products through experimentation and analytics.

Before Bending Spoons commits to an app concept, it rigorously evaluates market data. “We decide which apps to develop based on our understanding of potential market reach and the monetization possibilities an app offers,” says Marco Meneghelli, the head of Data Science at Bending Spoons. The company’s business model is largely built around auto-renewing subscriptions and in-app purchases, so understanding user willingness to pay is critical. By analyzing app market trends, competitor performance, and keyword/search data, Bending Spoons identifies niches where a well-designed app with strong monetization could capture value. In a crowded marketplace where hundreds of apps offer similar functions, this analytical edge helps Bending Spoons “identify opportunities for growth” that others miss.

Once an app is in their portfolio, Bending Spoons applies continuous, experiment-driven optimization. The company has built powerful internal tools to support this. One tool, internally called “Pico,” collects usage data from millions of users across their apps – logging events like installs, sessions, feature use, etc. – and enables the team to run “hundreds of thousands of queries daily” on this data. With Pico, Bending Spoons can A/B test changes to app features or paywall designs and quickly see the impact on user engagement and conversion. They aggregate metrics by user segment to understand, for example, how a new feature performs among Android users in North America versus iOS users in Europe. This data-driven experimentation is deeply ingrained: Bending Spoons runs heavy A/B testing and data-driven design tweaks continually to optimize retention and monetization.

Another internal tool, aptly named “Crystal,” provides broader market intelligence. Crystal pulls in “hundreds of millions of data points from [Bending Spoons’] own apps as well as a lot of external sources, every day,” and feeds them into models that reveal overall app market trends. This gives Bending Spoons a high-level dashboard of what categories are trending, how competitors are performing, and where there might be gaps to exploit. In essence, Bending Spoons has systematized the process of finding product-market fit – it treats it as a data science problem, both at the market selection level and the user experience level. By leveraging big data (via tools like Google BigQuery) and cloud infrastructure, the company was able to scale this approach without huge upfront investment in infrastructure.

The impact of this data discipline is evident: Bending Spoons grew from a tiny startup to one of the world’s top app publishers (by downloads, excluding games) through what Meneghelli calls an “industrial” approach to data-driven decision making. Every product decision – from small UI changes to major feature additions – can be tested and backed by evidence. This gives Bending Spoons an edge in finding and refining product-market fit at scale, rather than betting everything on unproven ideas. It also allows the company to optimize monetization finely. For example, if data shows that 5% of users would pay double for a certain premium feature, Bending Spoons won’t hesitate to adjust pricing or packaging accordingly to capture that value (more on their bold monetization strategy below).

Highly Selective Hiring and Unique Culture

Bending Spoons also differentiates itself through its people strategy – the company is extremely selective in hiring and has built a culture quite unlike the typical startup. In Italy, it’s well known that getting a job at Bending Spoons is hard. One discussion dubbed its recruitment process “one of the most difficult selection processes, comparable to and perhaps even more complicated than that of companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta.” In other words, Bending Spoons sets a very high bar for talent. Candidates face a rigorous gauntlet of assessments, practical tests, and interviews designed to filter for not just technical ability but also the “raw” talent and cultural fit the company demands.

Notably, the company often hires for potential over experience. Bending Spoons prefers to bring in young, highly talented graduates or junior engineers – people with strong innate ability and motivation – and then invest heavily in their training. Luca Ferrari’s team believes that raw talent outweighs specific experience in the long run, so they focus on molding high-potential hires internally. This approach has yielded an incredibly low attrition rate: the company boasts an unwanted turnover of only ~1% per year, meaning almost no one leaves. Out of hundreds of “Spooners” (as employees call themselves), only a handful depart each year, far below industry average. Such low churn suggests that those who pass the hiring filter thrive in the environment and are highly committed.

What kind of environment is that? By all accounts, a culture of disciplined excellence. Bending Spoons is known for being intensely focused and “uncompromising” in its expectations – to the point that it even shares a “controversial principles” document with job candidates upfront, outlining the high-performance culture and values so there are no illusions. Among its unusual cultural practices: the company has no formal job titles or hierarchy levels for engineers – everyone is simply “Software Engineer” (managers are just called “Leads”) regardless of seniority. There are also no performance bonuses – all salaries are 100% fixed. Bending Spoons concluded that elaborate bonus structures didn’t substantially drive performance, so they simplified compensation to flat, competitive salaries.

The company also encourages a mindset of engineering rigor and simplicity. It promotes a philosophy of “radical simplicity” – solutions should be as simple as possible unless complexity is proven beneficial. It’s telling that Bending Spoons even aims to eliminate on-call rotations for engineers by building systems so reliable that emergency calls are rarely needed. Engineers are pushed to anticipate and handle issues in advance because there is “no fallback” of an on-call team waiting to catch mistakes. This is highly unusual in tech, and it reflects the company’s disciplined, almost perfectionist ethos.

Despite (or because of) these high standards, Bending Spoons has become one of the most coveted employers for technologists in Italy. The firm keeps its headquarters in Milan and proudly proves that top-tier tech careers don’t have to only exist in Silicon Valley. It also makes working in Italy attractive by paying salaries comparable to London or San Francisco tech firms – described as “more in line with the UK and US than Italy’s standard”. One early employee described Bending Spoons’ culture as “more get shit done, more Anglo-Saxon than Italian,” meaning it’s intensely execution-focused rather than laid-back. By bringing Silicon Valley levels of compensation and ambition to Italy (where such opportunities are rare), Bending Spoons ensures it can hire world-class talent at a relative bargain – as one report put it, “a little Goldman Sachs in Italy” in terms of pay, which attracts the best local talent at lower cost than in the U.S.. This talent density is a key ingredient in the company’s ability to repeatedly build and improve great products.

Internal Platform and Tooling at Scale

Another differentiation is Bending Spoons’ use of internal tooling and a platform-team model to achieve efficiency across its many products. Rather than treating each app as a completely separate startup, Bending Spoons has built a centralized infrastructure that all product teams share. Core services – such as user authentication systems, payment and subscription management, analytics tracking, and even marketing attribution – are developed by a central platform team and provided as internal APIs or tools to every app team. This means when Bending Spoons acquires or launches a new product, the team doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel for critical backend components or growth tools; they can plug into the existing “machine.”

This vertical integration of capabilities is by design. As an analysis of Bending Spoons noted, “from product design to marketing and monetization, all core capabilities are in-house” and every acquired product is “plugged into this machine.”. The company essentially builds digital capabilities that scale across categories, not just individual apps. For example, the data science tools (Pico, Crystal) described earlier are part of this central arsenal. Likewise, expertise in areas like UI/UX design, app store optimization, performance marketing, and AI features are all shared across teams. Bending Spoons made its name early on by mastering app store optimization and monetization techniques on the App Store, and those tricks of the trade benefit every new product in the portfolio.

This approach yields powerful economies of scale. Ferrari notes that as they added more products, “our central functions can serve several products rather than needing to be built from scratch,” which made operations more efficient and improved margins over time. In effect, Bending Spoons can manage a portfolio of dozens of apps without a linear explosion in cost or headcount. Each app team (or “business unit”) is relatively autonomous in setting its objectives and choosing specific tools or tech stacks, but they all benefit from the common platform and best practices the company provides. This is somewhat reminiscent of tech giants (like Google or ByteDance) that have multiple successful products sharing infrastructure, but Bending Spoons has achieved it as a much smaller company by necessity. It’s a lean, synergistic model: a collection of independent product teams all riding on a shared backbone of technology and data.

Importantly, this internal platform extends to adopting a multi-app portfolio strategy. Bending Spoons intentionally cultivates a suite of apps, each dominating its niche (photo editing, fitness, note-taking, etc.), rather than betting everything on one product. The apps may serve different user needs, but under the hood they share know-how. The playbook for user acquisition or subscription upselling that worked in one app can be applied to another. The company explicitly draws inspiration from tech conglomerates like Tencent, ByteDance, or IAC – firms known for managing portfolios of consumer apps – but is doing so as a European startup with a unique twist. This roll-up strategy in tech is executed with “precision and purpose,” acquiring mature products and “revitalizing them with internal talent and monetizing them more effectively,” as one strategist observed.

Revitalizing Proven Products: Remini, Splice, and Evernote

The best way to illustrate Bending Spoons’ strategy is through its products. A few examples show how the company finds product-market fit at scale and builds sustainable revenues by improving and monetizing apps that others overlooked or underutilized.

  • Remini (AI Photo Enhancer): Remini is an AI-powered image enhancement app that can take low-quality or old photos and sharpen them using generative AI models. Bending Spoons acquired Remini in 2021 when it was a relatively small app, and then turbocharged its growth. The team literally “rewrote every line of the app’s code,” improving its performance and scalability. They also likely applied their marketing and monetization engine – for instance, introducing aggressive subscription plans for premium features. The results were dramatic: Remini shot up to the top of the app charts and, as of late 2024, reached about 90 million monthly active users. Ferrari notes this makes Remini “the second most-used generative AI product in the world” (only behind perhaps a giant like ChatGPT). Remini’s revenue model exemplifies Bending Spoons’ high-margin approach: the app is free to try, but power users can pay a hefty weekly subscription (around $10 per week) for unlimited enhancements. While such a price point might seem steep for a photo app, enough customers find value in it to gladly pay – illustrating Bending Spoons’ philosophy of focusing on the committed minority of users who will pay a premium, rather than catering to millions of free users. Remini’s explosive growth and monetization turned it into a cash cow that further funds the company’s expansion.

  • Splice (Video Editor): Splice is a mobile video editing app that was originally developed by another company and even owned by GoPro at one point. Bending Spoons acquired Splice and applied the same formula: improve the user experience, and implement a robust subscription monetization model. The timing coincided fortuitously with the pandemic – as people stayed home in 2020, many turned to creative projects on their phones. Splice saw a huge uptick in downloads and revenues during the pandemic. Bending Spoons reported that user growth across its apps accelerated, reaching 500 million total users, with Splice being a star performer in that period. Today, Splice’s business model relies on subscriptions as well, reportedly around $5 per week for full access. The app targets content creators and hobbyist video editors who are willing to pay for high-quality editing tools on mobile. By combining a good product (Splice has consistently high ratings) with data-informed tweaks and marketing, Bending Spoons has turned it into a leading video editor on mobile. The recurring subscription revenue from Splice is a high-margin stream that exemplifies Bending Spoons’ preference for steady cash-generating apps over ad-supported or one-off purchase models.

  • Evernote (Productivity Software): Bending Spoons made headlines when it acquired Evernote, the famed note-taking app, in late 2022. Evernote was a Silicon Valley darling in the 2010s but had stagnated, burning cash and failing to monetize a very large user base. This made it a perfect candidate for Bending Spoons. When the acquisition closed in 2023, Evernote had millions of users and about $100M in annual recurring revenue, but was unprofitable. Bending Spoons wasted no time in applying its “ruthless” turnaround approach. By mid-2023, they laid off nearly all of Evernote’s 250 employees in the US and Chile, moving Evernote’s operations to Europe to be handled by Bending Spoons’ own centralized team. This cut costs dramatically. Next, they pared back the free tier and hiked the prices of Evernote’s paid plans – roughly doubling the annual subscription fees (Personal plan jumped from ~$80 to $130/year). These moves were initially met with uproar from longtime Evernote users who had enjoyed generous free usage or low prices for years. However, the strategy was true to the company’s long-term, profit-focused philosophy. Ferrari openly acknowledges that “a price increase will generally lead to a loss of customers,” but if done right, the net effect can be positive: the most “committed customers” stay, pay more, and provide greater revenues to reinvest into improving the product. This is exactly what happened with Evernote. The price hike shed the freeloaders and locked in the loyal core, giving Evernote a viable business model. At the same time, Bending Spoons’ engineers got to work addressing the product’s technical debt and feature stagnation. They determined that Evernote’s backend needed a complete rewrite – migrating from an old monolithic server architecture to a modern microservices approach with cloud-managed databases. In a span of months, performance and stability improved markedly. The team also shipped a rapid cadence of product updates – “75 product improvements within a year” – breathing new life into an app that had seen little innovation for a long time. Thanks to these combined efforts, Evernote became profitable and sustainable under Bending Spoons’ ownership. It’s a prime example of how the company can take a well-known product that lost its way, and through cost discipline, data-informed pricing, and technical upgrades, turn it into a solid business again.

These case studies underscore how Bending Spoons’ model allows it to find product-market fit at scale and monetize it fully. In each case, the product had already proven its core utility (people want better photos, or easy video edits, or a note-taking repository), but the prior owners either weren’t monetizing effectively or weren’t operating efficiently. Bending Spoons steps in to provide operational excellence: cutting unnecessary costs, using data to identify what the most valuable users want, and then delivering improvements those users will pay for. The result is sustainable revenue streams – mostly via subscriptions – and products that can flourish long-term instead of fading out.

A Model for Modern Entrepreneurship

Bending Spoons offers a compelling alternative blueprint for tech entrepreneurship, one that contrasts with the traditional Silicon Valley ethos in several ways:

  • Profitability and Sustainability vs. Grow-at-all-Costs: Bending Spoons demonstrates that you can build a large tech business by prioritizing revenue and margins early. Rather than blitzscaling unprofitably or chasing a new round of funding every year, the company focused on unit economics and cash flow. It proved you don’t need to burn cash for a decade to reach hundreds of millions in revenue. This strategy kept the founders in control (no dependency on fickle VC markets) and created a business that could fund its own growth through internal profits. In an era where many startups are re-thinking the “growth over profit” mantra, Bending Spoons stands out as a successful case of scaling with financial discipline.

  • Data-Driven Decision Making at the Core: Modern entrepreneurs can learn from Bending Spoons’ almost scientific approach to building products. Every feature, every app idea, and every pricing decision is guided by data and experimentation. This reduces risk and increases the likelihood of finding real product-market fit. Instead of relying purely on vision or instinct, Bending Spoons treats product development as an iterative process of hypothesis and test – akin to a continuous R&D lab. The fact that a relatively small team in Italy could build an analytics infrastructure to rival much larger companies (with tools like Pico and Crystal processing millions of events) shows that any startup can benefit from embracing data analytics early. It’s a reminder that rigorous experimentation can unlock huge consumer insights and that even a “boring” niche app can become a hit if optimized relentlessly.

  • Focus on High-Value Users and High-Margin Models: Another hallmark of Bending Spoons’ strategy is focusing on the segment of users who derive the most value – and are willing to pay accordingly – rather than trying to be everything to everyone. Many Silicon Valley consumer apps historically chased sheer user count, hoping to monetize later (often via ads or not at all). Bending Spoons flips this: it would rather have fewer, paying users than millions of free users. By doubling Evernote’s prices and charging premium weekly rates for apps like Remini, the company shows a keen understanding of value-based pricing. This is arguably a more sustainable approach: it’s easier to build lasting revenue from 100,000 die-hard users paying $100/year than from 10 million free users who might churn at the next fad. Startups today, especially in consumer software, can take note of this subscription-first, value-first model to avoid the pitfalls of chasing vanity metrics. As one observer summarized Bending Spoons’ playbook: find a solid app, “optimize the monetization… driving higher LTV,” use that revenue to fuel growth via marketing, and repeat. There’s “nothing wrong with this model,” as it simply focuses on fundamentals of business while many others focus on hype.

  • Leveraging Acquisition as a Growth Strategy: Bending Spoons also illustrates a path for entrepreneurs to grow via acquisitions – a path more commonly associated with private equity than startups. By acquiring “mature or scalable digital products” and then improving them, Bending Spoons behaves like a consolidator in the software space. This can be a savvy strategy in markets where organic growth is slow or customer acquisition costs are high; buying an existing user base and then making that base more profitable is often more efficient than acquiring each user from scratch. While not every startup has the capital to do this, Bending Spoons’ example (especially now that it’s blending debt and equity to finance deals) might encourage more founders to consider strategic acquisitions earlier in their journey. Essentially, Bending Spoons is pioneering a hybrid of startup and private-equity mindset – sometimes dubbed “PE for the App Store generation”. This could well inspire a new wave of companies that grow by buying, not just building, and applying operational know-how to unlock value.

  • Building Globally, Not Just in Silicon Valley: Finally, Bending Spoons is a case study in building a global tech leader from an “unlikely” location. Ferrari has said one of their missions is to prove you can build a world-class tech company “with roots in an unlikely place – like Italy”. The company has remained headquartered in Milan, even as it serves hundreds of millions of users worldwide. For entrepreneurs outside of major tech hubs, this is an encouraging example. With remote work, cloud infrastructure, and global app distribution, Bending Spoons shows that geography is not destiny. It’s now a contender for Europe’s next big tech IPO, and its success is influencing local perceptions – Italian media and investors are now taking tech more seriously, seeing the talent and ambition that Bending Spoons exemplifies. In short, the company is moving the needle for the European startup ecosystem by quietly achieving what few thought possible outside Silicon Valley.

Conclusion

Bending Spoons charts a refreshing entrepreneurial path – one grounded in patience, data-driven iteration, and solid economics. In an age when many startups either flame out after chasing the latest trend, or survive only on endless VC lifelines, Bending Spoons has built a profitable app empire by doing the opposite. It finds value where others abandoned it (as with Evernote), it turns niche tools into global hits (as with Remini and Splice), and it rigorously optimizes everything from engineering to pricing. All of this is supported by a unique culture that insists on excellence and a long-term view.

For entrepreneurs and startup builders, Bending Spoons serves as a potent case study in modern tech business strategy. It shows that focusing on sustainable product-market fit, nurturing top talent with high standards, and leveraging internal platforms can create compounding advantages. It also proves that one can succeed massively in consumer software without following the Silicon Valley playbook of blitzscaling or hype-driven launches. Bending Spoons’ rise from a small Italian startup to a company nearing $500M in annual revenue and owning household-name apps is testament to the power of discipline over disorder. As the company continues to acquire and improve products, it is effectively writing a new playbook – one where quiet execution and smart strategy build lasting value. In the journey of modern entrepreneurship, Bending Spoons may well be a model to emulate, showing how to bend the rules of building tech companies and, in the process, reshape the industry’s expectations for what success looks like.

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Startups, Investment ThesisFrancesca Tabor