The Milan buyer quietly rewriting your apps

A $40bn operator that owns apps you may already pay for

Luca Ferrari, the co-founder and chief executive of Milan-based Bending Spoons, joined the All-In Podcast on Tuesday and spent 25 minutes laying out the playbook behind one of Europe’s most aggressive technology acquirers. His company now runs a stack most UK small firms touch every week without noticing: Airtable, Miro, Eventbrite, Vimeo and AOL. Host Jason Calacanis put its market cap at roughly $40B.

Ferrari’s pitch is that Bending Spoons is not a private-equity buyer in a tech coat — it is a technology operator. When it buys a business, it replaces the company’s technical foundation with a shared proprietary stack and a pooled team that moves between assets. The argument is structural: PE keeps portfolio companies separate for resale, and you cannot plug a shared engineering team into a business you intend to sell to a competitor.

The origin is unusual. In 2010 Ferrari and three co-founders launched an AI company very early, obviously. Three years later the venture ran out of money. Rather than liquidate, the VCs sold their shares back for $1 and told them to keep the remaining capital and take a holiday. The founders turned it into seed funding for Bending Spoons in 2013.

That seed — and an admission that the founders were not good at finding product-market fit — became the basis of a strategy that has not changed in substance: buy product-market fit from people who already have it, then deploy capital and engineering to make the asset more valuable. The first deal was a roughly $10,000 iPhone keyboard-personalisation app bought for its user base, not its revenue.

$40,000in leftover capital seeded Bending Spoons in 2013. Host Jason Calacanis put its current market cap at roughly $40B.

The shared stack that replaces every acquired business

The core of what Bending Spoons sells to itself, as Ferrari describes it, is an internal operating system of 50-plus proprietary technologies. The same stack gets applied to each acquired business; the existing technical foundation is rewritten. Roughly 800 engineers, designers and product managers move between assets under the same tools, rules and culture.

The staffing logic came from accident as much as design. Early sellers handed over the product but not the team, so Bending Spoons built replacement teams from scratch. When it later bought businesses with established teams, it could not explain why comparable operations needed more people. The conclusion: very small teams, very high talent density, very high ownership — running each unit at what he calls 10 out of 10.

The vendor-consolidation lever, often the most visible saving in a roll-up, is in Ferrari’s telling the smallest of the gains — perhaps one or two percentage points on margin by bringing cloud and licensing spend under one roof. The larger levers, in his ordering, are revenue (better product and monetisation), cost (leaner teams) and only then vendor optimisation. Customer-facing cross-sell has been tested and produced only marginal gains. The compounding, when it comes, is behind the scenes: shared tools, shared talent, shared standards.

What to watch on the apps you already pay for

Bending Spoons is not something a UK small firm will buy or run. What it is, increasingly, is one of the companies behind the apps you already pay for. Four things worth watching.

• Product rewrites are the default, not the exception. Ferrari confirmed the iPhone keyboard app was rewritten from scratch, and the hosts cited reporting on the right-sizing of Vimeo’s workforce. If your team relies on Airtable, Miro, Eventbrite or Vimeo, treat major UI or pricing changes as the base case.
• Support will get leaner before it gets better. Small, talent-dense teams mean faster shipping on the core product and thinner support tiers; plan your own runbooks and admin accordingly.
• Watch for further acquisitions — list which of your SaaS dependencies Bending Spoons could next own. Ferrari’s stated criteria are scale, five-to-six-year earnings predictability and substantial value-creation headroom, and almost every process has other bidders. The roll-up is unlikely to stop at the current list.
• A London hub is the next major site. Ferrari described London as gaining momentum alongside Milan and Madrid, with substantial US hiring expected after that. For a UK small firm, that is the most concrete local angle — the operator behind several of your tools is actively hiring in your city.