The Italian company acquired events platform Meetup last month, which has led to a period of restructuring similar to when Bending Spoons acquired Evernote.
Italian app developer Bending Spoons has raised $155m in its latest equity financing round, as it prepares to conduct more acquisitions.
The round saw Durable Capital Partners LP join existing investors Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, NB Renaissance, NUO Capital and StarTIP. The funding round has pushed Bending Spoons to a post-money valuation of $2.55bn.
The Italian company has already begun its acquisition plans this year, as it acquired the events platform Meetup last month. In 2022, Bending Spoons announced its acquisition of the popular note-taking and task management app Evernote.
After this acquisition, Evernote wound down its operations in the US and Chile and moved its business to Europe as part of the transition.
Headquartered in Milan, Bending Spoons develops a suite of mobile apps with around 100m global monthly users combined, including video-editor Splice and AI-assisted photo editor Remini. The company claims to have served more than 500m customers to date through its suite of products.
The company has been on a steady rise in recent years. In 2022, Bending Spoons announced it surpassed $100m in annual revenue. It also raised $340m in one of Italy’s largest funding rounds that same year, backed by big Italian banks and Maximum Effort, the film production company founded by actor Ryan Reynolds.
Bending Spoons also has an interest in the AI sector and claims that it has 2,000 GPUs continuously running its photo enhancement models. The Italian company claims that its AI enhances 40m photos every day.
Unfortunately, the recent acquisition of Meetup appears to be taking a similar trajectory to the Evernote acquisition, as a restructuring effort is taking place to incorporate Meetup into the Italain company’s portfolio.
This requires moving Meetup’s operations to Europe and means the start-up’s US team will be significantly reduced in size, according to a blogpost from Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari.
“The layoff decision was not made lightly, and the entire Bending Spoons team is grateful to those departing for their work in building Meetup and helping millions of people create their own communities around the world,” Ferrari said.
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