Meet Luca Ferrari, the Italian entrepreneur acquiring all your favorite companies

In early 2023, Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari reached out to his friend Jason Wenk, a fellow founder he’d met recently at Endeavor Outliers Retreat, Endeavor’s annual summit for the top-performing entrepreneurs in our network. Luca and Jason forged a strong friendship, and eventually invested in each other’s companies. On that day, Luca wanted to talk through a potential acquisition.

“My recollection is you were nervous to be made the bad guy, because you knew the right thing to do would be to buy this company and then make some pretty drastic changes,” Jason remembered, talking about it three years later with Luca during Endeavor Catalyst’s May 2026 Investor Meeting. “And so without knowing any of the details, you and I and a couple other Endeavor Entrepreneurs, we had a discussion and gave our different stories and opinions. And then some weeks later, I saw the news.”

Bending Spoons had acquired Evernote. It was the Italian tech company’s first splashy, well-known acquisition, and one that would help them establish their playbook — described by Luca as buying “businesses that we think have a lot of untapped potential, often iconic products, and then we reimagine and rebuild them: the organization, the underlying technology, user experience.”

That playbook has proved powerful. Luca and his co-founders began with $40,000 left over from their first, unsuccessful company, a “self-writing diary with AI, of all things, way before it was cool!” That company was ultimately a failure, but Luca pointed to the lessons learned along the way, especially his team’s ability to become “really good at functional skills — software engineering, UI design, monetization, marketing.”

When Luca and his co-founders launched Bending Spoons in Milan in 2013, they could use those same skills to acquire struggling companies and revamp them. “We try to envision the business [as] the best version of itself possible, and then do the hard, time-consuming, painful work of rebuilding it from the ground up. If we do that right, we generate really good returns, earnings are expanded, and we can reinvest that cashflow into new acquisitions, making our platform stronger.” 

In 2025, Bending Spoons generated $1.3B in revenue. In March 2026, the company had 500 million monthly active users, and more than nine million monthly paying customers. They’ve completed more than 50 acquisitions of companies including Vimeo, AOL, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, and many more. The company’s team includes a core team of Spooners — about 650 employees — plus the teams they’ve acquired, bringing them to a roughly 2,000-person workforce. 

In July 2026, Bending Spoons went public, with a $18B IPO.

Digitization took 30 years. AI needs to be faster.

All roads lead to AI, but Luca warns that just because companies are talking about it, doesn’t mean they’re implementing it.

“If history is any indication, when radical new technologies or possibilities arise, most companies are pretty slow at fully adopting them,” Luca said. “Everybody… [is] talking about AI in press releases [but] if anything, I’d say there may be a negative correlation between [talking about AI] and actually being good at using it.”

He pointed to the internet as an example: “Still, in 2026, there are major consulting companies focused on digitization. Computers and the internet have been around for at least 30 years! AI might be faster, but it ultimately doesn’t inject itself into companies. It doesn’t change processes.”

Bending Spoons, however, is well-positioned to seize all the power and potential of AI. Luca pointed to the boost AI offers scalability — “One of our bottlenecks, on and off, has been having enough good people trained to understand our playbook” — as well as the wider disruption AI brings to the market. With that disruption, he expects company willingness to sell to rise: “For a serial acquirer, that’s great.”

Luca estimates that AI has already made Bending Spoons three times as productive. For real, deliverable impact, he urges founders not to be too timid in implementing AI.

“Every Spooner has what we call an Alt-Spooner, like an alter ego, which is an AI [agent] that has exactly the same access as the Spooner,” he explained. “It can, in theory, complete every task that the Spooner can, without that person opening doors or providing anything. For an engineer, that means that AI can write code, run tests, simulate in development, check whether everything is fine, ask another agent to double check, go back at it, and the engineer gets to see the result that’s already gone through end-to-end round tests. If you use it this way, effectiveness as well as efficiency goes up. It’s the difference between a co-founder and an advisor. You [need] to make AI a co-founder or a real colleague with full access.”

“Obviously that requires a level of risk tolerance,” Luca added. “You can put intelligent boundaries to limit the damage it can do — we have certainly had issues with that. But the upside is immense.”

An idea takes you to a million. Execution takes you to a billion.

Luca’s acquisition playbook is a perfect example of a well-known stumbling block in entrepreneurship: Your idea is great. Your customers are flocking. But somewhere along the line, your business gets bigger… and begins to flounder.

Bending Spoons is, as Jason put it, “extraordinarily good at all those areas — execution frameworks, people management, organizational design — where most entrepreneurs are really poor, and it might be why they end up having to sell their companies to you. Because they had a good idea and they could only take it so far.”

“Another big element is passion,” Luca added. “Some people enjoy going from zero to one, but they don’t actually enjoy perfecting their company over a long period of time. It’s more boring to them. So that’s great, a win win. You sell to someone who’s a passionate operator and you can see your business being maximized, if you will, and you can go back to thinking something up from scratch that’s more exciting.”

But in that execution period is where Luca and his Spooners see scale and success. He marks two elements as crucial: dedication and feedback loops.

“And if you’re deliberate and disciplined, over time, you’ll have a big advantage in terms of possessing an accurate model of how reality works. And you’ll be able to make much better and faster decisions.”, he complements.

Experience only counts when you’re analyzing it, looking for the mistakes or the wins. “You need to have a level of obsession and paranoia. Obsession as in, ‘this is almost all I want to do’, and paranoia as in, ‘I’m probably wrong, I need to look for better ways, what am I missing?’ These things don’t make your life more pleasant, but they do tremendously increase the chances that you’ll be amazing at what you do over time,” confessed Luca.

Building a better future means looking Elsewhere

Luca and Jason are both interested in business not just for business’s sake, but for the chance to contribute in some greater way to society (after all, Jason joked, as founder of a fintech company called Altruist, it would be “pretty bad if it was like Evil Corp”). But a company also runs into the limits of its own remit. So what then?

“I believe Bending Spoons has positive implications for the world,” said Luca. “We’re better off if  companies run efficiently, it makes the economic pie larger in time, and if governments do their job with taxation that makes everybody better off down the line. But it’s certainly not a company that has an impact even remotely comparable to Tesla, for example. So absent that, we look for other ways, and what we’re excited about doing is to make Bending Spoons a legendary institution. To reset the bar for what it means to be an absolutely excellent company, with some of the best people, the most talent-dense teams, the most high performance cultures, the best run products in the world. And hopefully, that has a spillover effect.”

One of those things Luca resisted doing? Moving to San Francisco, even as most of Bending Spoons’ business became US-focused. One reason was logistical — Italy had a “particularly appealing ratio of local talent to job opportunities.” The other was mission-driven.

“The world is a better place if there are more hubs, more pockets of excellence, wealth, knowledge, advancement, innovation than just California,” said Luca. “It’s perfectly fine that California is the main one. But if it’s the only one, that’s a problem. It’s not a sustainable world. We feel proud that we have helped accelerate the development of the ecosystem in Italy and elsewhere. Today it’s leaps and bounds from what it was ten years ago. We’re not the only reason. But we’re one of the reasons.”