The Pulse: Bending Spoons' Acquisition Strategy

Italian mobile app developer Bending Spoons has acquired the remains of Hopin—essentially the StreamYard product. All Hopin staff will soon be laid off. This follows Bending Spoons' acquisition of Airtable for $1.285B in cash this week, less than the$1.4B Airtable had raised and far below its $11B valuation from December 2021.

Selling to Bending Spoons is a company admitting defeat. It's an admission of inability or unwillingness to turn the business around, and a desire to get the highest possible cash exit. Bending Spoons pays top dollar for struggling businesses with well-known brands, then operates the product with a fraction of the staff, often letting go most or all of the original team as operations move to their in-house engineering team in Italy and Europe.

The Evernote playbook

The pattern is well-established. When Bending Spoons acquired Evernote in 2022, they discovered the note-taking service was running as a Java 11 monolith with user data sharded across 750 provisioned virtual machines on Google Cloud—in 2023. At a time when cloud-native setups were common knowledge.

Evernote's setup was inefficient and operationally heavy, with manual interventions needed to keep the service running. Performance was poor, and on-call was brutal. Bending Spoons re-architected the whole thing.

The original Evernote engineering team had never made these changes. Would they ever have? Bending Spoons' "shock therapy"—starting with a blank page and a new team focused on efficiency—proved remarkably effective. The service became more reliable, more performant, and cheaper to operate.

But there was a cost. Customers paying $37/year** for the Pro plan pre-2023 were charged **$250/year after the acquisition. Price hikes followed performance improvements. Bending Spoons kept investing, adding new features including AI ones, but they're optimizing for maximizing revenue, not maximizing the number of customers.

The Hopin-StreamYard acquisition

Hopin was once the fastest-growing startup in Europe. Raised $1B** in funding. Valued at **$7.75B. Acquired StreamYard for $250M in 2021.

Then the crash. Layoffs in 2022 (12%), more in 2023 (29%), then another 17%. In October 2023, Hopin returned $581M of capital to investors—58% of all amount raised. Last month, Hopin's UK entity entered liquidation. Insiders told me it was merely a restructure, with UK employees joining StreamYard. Basically, Hopin became the business it had purchased back in 2021.

Now Bending Spoons has acquired the remains. All Hopin staff will be laid off. This affects around 80 staff working on StreamYard and another 70 on other Hopin products (Streamable and Superwave). Severance packages are generous—around 3-4 months' salary—but morale is very low. A subset of the team was requested to help with the transition, then let go afterwards.

The numbers

StreamYard generates about **$70M per year** in revenue, growing, from about$40M when Hopin bought it in 2021. It's at around break-even and can be easily made profitable. StreamYard accounts for roughly 95% of Hopin's revenue.

I've exclusively learned that StreamYard's founders actually offered to buy the company back from Hopin's board and operate independently. Some staff knew of this plan and supported it. The Bending Spoons sale took everyone by surprise.

Why would Hopin choose a buyer guaranteed to sack existing staff? The board had no real choice. With investors like a16z, General Catalyst, Coatue, Northzone, Salesforce Ventures, Tiger Global, Accel, and others controlling the board, the rationale was simple: maximize the amount of money clawed back from a failed bet. Bending Spoons probably offered more than the founders could.

Winners and losers

Investors poured $1B into Hopin. They got$581M back in 2023, plus whatever the StreamYard sale brings (likely $200-300M). They'll lose about 20-42% of their investment. Far from a 100% loss, but still a loss.

Employees who expected a better outcome now have worthless shares. Hopin did pay above-market base salaries and offered generous severance, but that's cold comfort.

The StreamYard founders walked away with $250M cash in 2021. They're the clear winners.

Bending Spoons has acquired a market-leading streaming product generating $70M per year and growing. They'll operate it efficiently and turn a profit.

Hopin's founder and former CEO, Johnny Boufarhat, sold more than £100M ($127M) of his shares in 2021 at the peak of the hype. He probably netted more money than Hopin—excluding StreamYard—generated in its lifetime. When everyone is buying, selling can be a profitable strategy.

The bigger picture

Hopin is a reminder that raising too much venture capital can have unexpected, seemingly irrational outcomes. Firing all staff from a company making $70M/year while being break-even or profitable sounds irrational. But it's rational for investors who want to cash out their losses and make new bets, and for a buyer like Bending Spoons who has a proven model for operating products more efficiently.

2020-2022 was a time when startup valuations hit all-time highs, fueled by zero interest rates and pandemic-driven changes in consumer spending. The hangover is real. Some companies—like Revolut, Bolt, and Spotify—have grown into their valuations. Others, like Hopin and Cazoo, have collapsed.

Bending Spoons' playbook is brutal but effective. They buy distressed assets, re-engineer them for efficiency, and extract profit. For the companies they acquire, it's the end of the road. For Bending Spoons, it's just another deal.