Bending Spoons
Bending Spoons is a unique company. I don’t know if we should call them a tech startup that is a PE or a PE firm that writes code. It’s probably both.
Based in Milan, Bending Spoons started as a mobile app developer, was profitable from day one, and went on to become one of the largest mobile publishers in the world. Their rise was somewhat stealthy - US tech folks only started to take notice after they acquired Evernote, MeetUp, Hopin, WeTransfer, Vimeo, and Brightcove [update: and AOL and Eventbrite]
They are often compared to traditional PE firms like Constellation Software etc but traditional PE firms can’t and won’t be able to do what BSP does in software. PE firms are not engineering, product, or design-focused, and it’s not in their DNA to tinker with product.
BSP takes a more hands-on approach with its acquisitions. They acquire apps with product market fit, rewrite their backend systems, streamline employee bloat, ship feature upgrades and rebuild them from scratch. They also consolidate support, infra, and dev teams into shared teams and run most of them from Milan. The services they buy tend to run better post-acquisition. Because of their scale, they’re able to drive adoption to new features, cross-pollinate distribution, have dynamic pricing and so on.
Venture-backed startups that have product-market fit, have blitz-scaled, and are big enough but not growing fast enough now have an escape valve in the form of companies like Bending Spoons.