Bending Spoons: The Stealth Tech Giant Behind Vimeo’s Layoffs
If you’ve heard about Vimeo’s sweeping layoffs in early 2026 but aren’t familiar with Bending Spoons, you’re not alone. This Milan-based tech firm quietly acquired Vimeo for $1.38 billion in late 2025—and has since moved swiftly to restructure the video platform, cutting entire teams, including its core video engineering group. But who exactly is Bending Spoons, and why does it keep acquiring beloved digital brands only to overhaul them dramatically?
Credit: Bending Spoons
The answer reveals a bold, controversial strategy that’s reshaping how some of the internet’s most recognizable apps operate—often at the cost of their original identity and workforce.
What Is Bending Spoons?
Bending Spoons isn’t a traditional private equity firm or a venture capital shop. It calls itself a “product-led acquirer” of digital businesses—a hybrid between a startup studio and a turnaround operator. Founded in 2013 by a group of Italian engineers and entrepreneurs, the company has spent the last decade perfecting a playbook: identify underperforming but widely used software products, buy them outright, and aggressively optimize them for profitability.
Unlike typical investors who focus on financial engineering, Bending Spoons embeds its own engineers, product managers, and data scientists directly into acquired companies. The goal? Streamline operations, reduce costs, and boost margins—often through drastic headcount reductions and product simplification.
Today, Bending Spoons employs roughly 400 to 500 people (internally called “Spooners”) but oversees a portfolio that reaches over 300 million monthly active users and serves more than 10 million paying customers globally.
The Bending Spoons Playbook: Buy, Cut, Optimize
Since its founding, Bending Spoons has built a reputation for surgical precision—and controversy. Its acquisition targets share common traits: strong brand recognition, loyal user bases, and stagnant or declining revenue. Once acquired, these companies typically undergo rapid transformation.
Take Evernote, for example. After Bending Spoons bought the note-taking app in 2022, it slashed staff, removed niche features, and refocused the product on core functionality. Longtime users complained about lost capabilities, but the company reported improved retention and faster load times.
Similarly, after acquiring WeTransfer in 2023, Bending Spoons eliminated legacy infrastructure, migrated systems to its own cloud stack, and cut nearly half the workforce. The result? A leaner operation with higher margins—but also widespread backlash from creative professionals who felt the service lost its soul.
Now, with Vimeo, the pattern is repeating. Within weeks of closing the deal, Bending Spoons reportedly laid off large swaths of employees, including the entire video team responsible for core encoding and playback infrastructure. For a video-hosting platform, that’s akin to gutting the engine of a car while it’s still moving.
Why Vimeo Was a Target
Vimeo may seem like an odd choice for a cost-cutting overhaul. After all, it’s long been the go-to platform for filmmakers, marketers, and businesses seeking ad-free, high-quality video hosting. But despite its prestige, Vimeo struggled to turn consistent profits under previous ownership.
Its parent company, IAC, had invested heavily in enterprise features and AI tools, yet growth remained sluggish compared to rivals like YouTube and even newer entrants like Loom. By 2025, Vimeo’s stock had underperformed for years, making it ripe for a strategic buyer.
Enter Bending Spoons. With deep expertise in mobile optimization, data-driven product design, and operational efficiency, the firm saw an opportunity to “fix” Vimeo—not by adding more bells and whistles, but by stripping it down to its most profitable essentials.
Still, the speed and scale of the layoffs have raised eyebrows. Employees described the cuts as sudden and poorly communicated, with some learning they’d been let go via Slack messages or locked-out accounts. That approach has fueled criticism that Bending Spoons prioritizes spreadsheets over people.
The Human Cost of Efficiency
Behind every “optimization” is a human story. At Vimeo, seasoned engineers who built the platform’s real-time transcoding pipeline were let go. Customer support teams that handled enterprise clients vanished overnight. Even product designers who had shaped Vimeo’s clean interface for years were shown the door.
This isn’t unique to Vimeo. Former employees at Evernote and WeTransfer have shared similar experiences: a culture shift from collaborative creativity to metric-driven austerity, where every feature must justify its existence through direct revenue impact.
Bending Spoons argues this discipline is necessary. In a post-pandemic tech landscape marked by rising interest rates and investor impatience, bloated teams and experimental features are luxuries few companies can afford. Their stance: better to make hard cuts now than risk total collapse later.
Yet critics question whether short-term gains come at the expense of long-term trust. When users feel a product has lost its character—or when creators lose faith in a platform’s stability—they often leave. And once gone, they rarely return.
A Billion Users, Zero Brand Recognition
Perhaps the most striking thing about Bending Spoons is how invisible it remains despite its massive reach. Most people use its products daily without knowing they’re part of the same ecosystem. Meetup organizes local events. WeTransfer sends large files. Eventbrite sells tickets. Evernote stores ideas. Vimeo hosts videos.
Together, these platforms touch over one billion people—yet Bending Spoons itself has no consumer-facing brand. It doesn’t run ads, issue press releases, or maintain a flashy website. Its leadership rarely gives interviews. The company operates like a ghost in the machine of the digital economy.
That anonymity is strategic. By staying behind the scenes, Bending Spoons avoids public scrutiny—until something goes wrong. Layoffs, feature removals, or service outages inevitably drag the firm into the spotlight, often casting it as a faceless corporate villain.
But insiders describe a different reality: a highly technical, data-obsessed organization that genuinely believes it’s rescuing floundering apps from irrelevance. Whether that belief aligns with user expectations is another matter entirely.
What’s Next for Bending Spoons?
With a war chest reportedly bolstered by strong cash flow from its portfolio, Bending Spoons shows no signs of slowing down. Industry watchers speculate it’s eyeing other struggling-but-iconic platforms—think names like Trello, Basecamp, or even parts of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite.
Its success hinges on a delicate balance: can it modernize aging software without alienating loyal users? Can it cut costs without killing the magic that made these products beloved in the first place?
For now, Vimeo serves as the latest test case. If Bending Spoons can stabilize the platform, improve performance, and grow subscriptions without further eroding trust, it may validate its controversial model. If not, it risks becoming a cautionary tale about the limits of efficiency in creative tech.
One thing is certain: in an era where “growth at all costs” is giving way to disciplined profitability, Bending Spoons is betting that less—fewer features, fewer employees, fewer distractions—is more. Whether the internet agrees remains to be seen.
