Private Equity Hipsters Are Coming for Your Favorite Apps

Phil Libin, the co-founder of Evernote, was no longer managing the business by 2022, but he remained an attentive investor and still used the note-taking app every day. He knew that Evernote was stagnating and that its bosses were entertaining buyout interest. The acquirer, he learned, was a Milan-based company he’d never heard of called Bending Spoons SpA. “Frankly,” Libin says, “I didn’t have any expectations.”

Several other entrepreneurs have gone through similar experiences since. Bending Spoons is like a new kind of private equity firm for the app store generation. Since buying Evernote last year, Bending Spoons has snapped up five other companies. That includes Dutch file-sharing service WeTransfer, which had shelved plans for an initial public offering that would’ve valued the company at €716 million ($800 million) just a couple of years before its sale, and the assets of Meetup, a bankrupt events-listing business that briefly belonged to WeWork Inc.