Last year, video platform Vimeo announced plans to sell itself for $1.38 billion to tech company Bending Spoons.
Milan-based Bending Spoons, which since its founding in 2014 has acquired more than 50 businesses, including Evernote, AOL, Eventbrite, and Meetup, soon faced questions from Vimeo users wondering whether it would continue to offer the same level of service.
“I vividly remember some enterprise customers being worried about us stopping serving their segment,” says Marco Castello, a longtime Bending Spoons employee who now serves as general manager of Vimeo. “Essentially, they were worried that we’d stop investing into the enterprise segment, because they thought, An acquisition is coming. We don’t know these guys, so what’s going to happen?”
Castello says that since the purchase, he and his colleagues have spoken to more than 200 users of the software. Those users represent Vimeo’s distinct business segments: independent filmmakers, enterprise customers creating and distributing corporate videos, and streamers using Vimeo’s tools to build their own branded video channels.
The goal, he says, was not only to reassure them about the company’s continued commitment to Vimeo, but also to learn what they wanted changed about the product.
What customers requested, Castello says, wasn’t significant new features so much as fixes and upgrades to existing ones. By May 2026, the company said it had fixed more than 100 bugs on the platform and delivered more than 50 improvements in areas ranging from live-event search to page-loading performance.
One of the most common complaints was simply that basic functions, including search and video uploads, were uncomfortably slow. Search times, homepage load speeds, and upload times have all improved, Castello says.
Vimeo has also added quality-of-life features such as the ability to adjust the privacy settings of multiple videos at once, use internal collaboration tools without requiring video reviewers to log in, and access to an upgraded AI-powered captioning system. Additional AI-enabled features, including automated dashboard creation for enterprise users, are also in the works.
Those kinds of relatively minor changes can have a big impact for users, Castello says. Simply switching caption-service providers, for instance, allowed Vimeo to dramatically expand the number of supported languages, benefiting businesses that see captions as a core accessibility need.
“With that small change, we increased the languages from 7 to 99,” he says. “Sometimes we just focus on the small things that can have a drastic impact on the user experience.”
The Bending Spoons playbook
Bending Spoons, which went public at an $18 billion valuation over the summer, has at times been criticized for imposing layoffs at companies it acquires and, particularly in the case of Evernote, revamping pricing plans in ways that drove off some longtime users.
At Vimeo, Bending Spoons cut jobs as it reorganized the company’s product-development teams into lean groups focused on its three core market segments.
“We can confirm that there was a layoff at Vimeo in December 2025,” Castello writes in an email to Fast Company. “We retained the majority of specialized teams like sales, customer support, and curation (Staff Picks), while skilled Bending Spoons engineers, developers, and product managers took over the technical and product operations. We aren’t able to provide numbers on how many people were impacted.”
Bending Spoons, which announced in September that it had completed its roughly $1.29 billion acquisition of data and workflow management tool Airtable and entered into plans to acquire collaboration platform Miro for roughly $1.36 billion, has drawn comparisons to private equity for its model of revamping legacy tech brands while cutting staff.
In an August earnings call, cofounder and CEO Luca Ferrari told investors that the company has also grown more efficient at deploying employees, known as Spooners, to transform acquired companies.
“For instance, around 60 Spooners worked on Vimeo during Q2, broadly in line with the number of Spooners who worked on the Evernote transformation in 2023,” he said. “This is despite Vimeo being roughly four times the size of Evernote in revenue terms, and a more complicated business from both a technical and operational perspective.”
A different definition of growth
But Bending Spoons has also emphasized, in both financial filings and public statements, that it tends to focus on the long-term future of the companies it acquires rather than rolling out flashy features or quickly flipping businesses to other investors.
“For Bending Spoons, the growth engine has actually been great at acquiring and operating businesses,” says Matteo Danieli, Bending Spoons cofounder and VP of product. “We do not necessarily need to prove massive growth on products, and so we are actually free to focus on what’s useful for users.”
For Vimeo, he says, that includes the community of independent filmmakers who long made the platform a home but in recent years often felt neglected as its enterprise business took off.
Under Bending Spoons, Vimeo has revamped profile pages to let creators better showcase their work, enhanced controls around videos embedded on other sites, and added storage and other features to free plans.
More broadly, Castello says, Bending Spoons’s approach of deploying small teams to upgrade a product allows it to move quickly after an acquisition.
“We believe that smaller teams—leaner teams—can be much faster at innovation,” he says. “And so, whenever we approach reorganization, we do it in a way that, essentially, we try to bring the product back to a startup mode, where a very small, committed group of people can deliver amazing work in a very short period of time.”
Who Vimeo is really for
Vimeo also recently rolled out new plans aimed largely at midsize business customers that Castello says had been using individual plans in violation of the platform’s terms. The move naturally drew consternation from some users, though Castello says the new plans also come with added features.
“That comes with greater storage, greater bandwidth, all the tools that they need for collaboration, those kind of things,” he says.
According to Danieli, moving forward the company plans to keep serving each of Vimeo’s existing market segments without adding too much complexity to the software. He notes, “We’re trying to find the best possible way to serve all of them exceptionally well in a way that doesn’t complicate the product too much.”