This week, Italian mobile app developer Bending Spoons acquired Airtable for 1.4 billion Airtable had raised in total funding. More tellingly, it is a fraction of the $11 billion valuation the company commanded at its peak in December 2021.
The Bending Spoons Playbook
Selling to Bending Spoons is often an admission of defeat. It means a company is unwilling or unable to turn its business around. Bending Spoons excels at paying top dollar for struggling brands with recognized names. They then take over operations and run the product with a fraction of the original staff. The original team is usually let go as operations move to the company's in-house engineering team in Italy and Europe.
The Evernote Overhaul
A prime example of this strategy is Evernote. When Bending Spoons acquired the note-taking service in 2022, the engineering team discovered the backend was running as a Java 11 monolith. User data was sharded across 750 provisioned virtual machines on Google Cloud. This was in 2023, a time when cloud-native setups and microservices had been industry standards for years.
The setup was inefficient and operationally heavy. Manual interventions were frequent. Performance was poor because many VMs were overloaded. The on-call experience was brutal for the engineers maintaining it.
After the acquisition, Bending Spoons completely re-architected the platform. The result was a more reliable, performant, and cheaper service. The question is: would the original team have ever made those changes? The company had gone years without doing so. Sometimes, starting from a blank page is the only way to fix deep-seated technical debt.
The StreamYard Acquisition
Bending Spoons recently acquired the remains of Hopin, which essentially means the StreamYard product. This affects around 80 staff on StreamYard and another 70 on other products like Streamable and Superwave. The staff were told they would be laid off, receiving about 3-4 months of severance.
The Financials
In 2021, Hopin paid 40 million in annual revenue. Now, StreamYard generates around $70 million per year, is growing, and is roughly break-even.
Hopin had raised 7.75 billion valuation. It is a failed bet. Investors like a16z, General Catalyst, and Tiger Global now want to claw back as much money as possible. Bending Spoons likely paid close to $200 million for StreamYard, based on a revenue multiple similar to other asset sales.
The Human Cost of Efficiency
The founders of StreamYard actually offered to buy the company back from the board. This would have been a better outcome for employees, most of whom would have kept their jobs. However, the board, driven by investor interests, opted to sell to the highest bidder—Bending Spoons.
This is the brutal math of venture capital. Firing all staff from a company making $70 million a year sounds irrational from the outside. But for investors, it is rational. They want to cash out their losses and invest that capital in new bets. For Bending Spoons, the acquisition pays for itself if they can generate more profit than the purchase price over a few years.
The Bigger Picture
Hopin is a cautionary tale. It reminds us that raising too much venture capital can have seemingly irrational outcomes. The company that was once Europe's fastest-growing startup is now essentially a shell, its valuable assets sold off.
In the end, the biggest winner might be Hopin's founder, Johnny Boufarhat. He sold more than $127 million of his shares in 2021 at the peak of the hype. It is a reminder that in a market where everyone is buying, the smartest move is often to sell.