Bending Spoons: the insane valuation and what's really going on

So let me get this straight. An Italian company called Bending Spoons just raised a war chest of nearly $3.5 billion in combined debt and equity, hitting an $11 billion valuation, to go on a shopping spree for… AOL and Vimeo?

Give me a break.

This isn't a growth strategy. This is a trip to the digital graveyard with a golden shovel. Bending Spoons has become the world's most well-funded curator of has-been tech, collecting dusty brands like they’re forgotten Beanie Babies and convincing Wall Street they’re a priceless collection. And the scariest part? The suits are actually buying it.

The Island of Misfit Tech

Let’s look at the portfolio. Evernote, the once-great note-taking app that became a bloated, unusable mess. Meetup, a platform that feels like it’s been cryogenically frozen since 2012. WeTransfer, StreamYard, Remini... a hodgepodge of decent-but-niche tools. Now they're adding AOL—yes, that AOL—and Vimeo, the platform everyone remembers as "the serious YouTube" before they realized nobody actually wanted a serious YouTube.

This isn't a portfolio; it's a support group for tech that peaked during the Obama administration.

Bending Spoons' whole model seems to be acquiring brands with some lingering name recognition, gutting them, and slapping a subscription model on whatever is left. They're not innovators; they're digital landlords, buying up old properties, giving them a cheap coat of paint, and jacking up the rent. It’s like buying a classic car. Not to restore it to its former glory, but to strip it for copper wiring and sell the iconic hood ornament on eBay. The value isn't in what the product does, but in the residual nostalgia of the brand itself.

And what, exactly, is the grand vision here? To stitch these disparate parts into some kind of Frankenstein's monster of productivity and media? I can just see the pitch meeting now, a consultant pointing at a slide with a bunch of logos connected by arrows: "Imagine the synergies of an AOL email user sharing a WeTransfer link to a Vimeo video embedded in an Evernote note they found via a Meetup group!" It's nonsense. It's a collection of assets, not a coherent ecosystem. What are they actually building other than a line on a balance sheet?

This whole thing reminds me of when I tried to clean out my parents' garage. You find all this old stuff—a VCR, a Walkman, a box of dial-up modems—and for a second you think, "Hey, maybe this is worth something!" Then you realize it's just junk. The difference is, I didn't get T. Rowe Price to give me a billion dollars for it.

The Money Makes No Sense

This is the part that really gets me. The valuation. Eleven billion dollars. For what? A company whose primary skill is acquiring other companies that couldn't make it on their own? This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of financial logic.

Let’s deconstruct the PR-speak from the CEO, Luca Ferrari: “This moment is a validation of a decade’s worth of work... We remain early in our journey and have ambitious plans for continued investment and growth.”

My translation: “Holy crap, they actually gave us the money. We’re going to keep buying stuff until someone figures out this whole thing is held together with spit and nostalgia.”

The investors—Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Cox Enterprises—these are supposed to be the smartest people in the room. Are they seeing something I'm not? Or are we in another one of those late-stage market cycles where money is so cheap and dumb that it'll chase anything that smells like tech? Maybe the play is purely financial engineering. Buy distressed assets with cheap debt, bundle them together, and find a greater fool to sell them to later. It ain't about building the next Google; it’s about flipping digital real estate. Italy’s Bending Spoons hits $11B valuation after fresh $710M raise led by T. Rowe Price — TFN.

And what happens to the users caught in the middle? The millions of people still clinging to their Evernote accounts or using Vimeo for their indie film projects? They're the ones who will pay the price, literally, when the subscription fees inevitably go up and the features they rely on are either monetized into oblivion or left to rot. Bending Spoons claims its services have reached over one billion people. That’s not a measure of success; it’s a measure of how many people are about to get a notification that their free plan is being eliminated. Offcourse, that's just business, right?

I just keep coming back to the acquisitions of AOL and Vimeo. It feels less like a strategic masterstroke and more like a private equity firm playing a game of Pokémon Go with forgotten tech brands. Gotta catch 'em all! But what's the point of having a full Pokédex if all your Pokémon are fainted?

Just Don't Call It Innovation

At the end of the day, here's the ugly truth. Bending Spoons isn't a tech company; it's a holding company with a tech-bro paint job. They’re not building the future. They’re buying the past, packaging it, and selling it to investors who are desperate for a story. This $11 billion valuation isn’t a reflection of groundbreaking technology or visionary leadership. It’s a monument to a frothy, nonsensical market where brand names are worth more than actual progress. Good for them, I guess. But for the rest of us, it’s just another sign that the tech world has more money than sense.